Welcome to the Bush-Obama White House: They're Spying on Us

Welcome to the era of Bush-Obama, a 16-year span of U.S. history that will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency. On the war against a tactic—terrorism—and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election.

It made little difference.

Despite his clear and popular promises to the contrary, President Obama has not shifted the balance between security and freedom to a more natural state—one not blinded by worst fears and tarred by power grabs. If anything, things have gotten worse.
Killing civilians and U.S. citizens via drone.
Seizing telephone records at the Associated Press in violation of Justice Department guidelines.
Accusing a respected Fox News reporter of engaging in a conspiracy to commit treason for doing his job.
Detaining terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, despite promises to end the ill-considered Bush policy.

Even the IRS scandal, while not a matter of foreign policy, strikes at the heart of growing concerns among Americans that their privacy is government's playpen.

And now this: The Guardian newspaper reports that the National Security Agency is collecting telephone records of tens of millions of customers of one of the nation's largest phone companies, Verizon.

If the story is accurate, the action appears to be legal. The order was signed by a judge from a secret court that oversees domestic surveillance. It may also be necessary; U.S. intelligence needs every advantage it can get over the nation's enemies.

But for several reasons the news is chilling.
1.Verizon probably isn't the only company coughing up its documents. Odds are incredibly strong that the government is prying into your telephone records today.
2.Issued in April, the NSA order "could represent the broadest surveillance order known to have been issued," according to The Washington Post. "It also would confirm long-standing suspicions of civil liberties advocates about the sweeping nature of U.S. surveillance through commercial carries under laws passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."
3.This appears to be a "rubber stamp," order, reissued every few months since 2001. As is the case with all government programs, the systematic snooping into your telephone records is unlikely to ever expire without public outcry.
4.Congress is full of hypocrites. Liberals who criticized Bush are less incensed with Obama. Republicans who bowed to Bush are now blasting Obama. The next time your congressional representative criticizes Obama for curbing civil liberties, ask if he or she would vote to repeal the Patriot Act, the post-911 law that handed unfettered power to the intelligence and military bureaucracies. Most won't.
5.The Bush-Obama White House hates transparency. President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, were justifiably criticized by Democrats (none more successfully so than Obama himself) for their penchant for secrecy. Obama promised that he would run history's most transparent administration. By almost any measure, on domestic and well as foreign policies, Obama has broken that promise.

It is the lack of transparency that is most galling about the security versus civil liberties debate under Obama, because it shows his lack of faith in the public. Americans know a high level of secrecy and dirty work is needed to keep them safe. Most trust their president. Many approve of his job performance.

Still, they expect and deserve an open discussion about how to fight terrorism without undermining the Constitution.

Obama started that conversation with a recent address on the drone program, media leaks and the need to move American off a constant war footing. It was a compelling and well-considered argument for the balance he is claiming to strike.

But he made the speech under pressure, and reluctantly. It only came amid new revelations about the drone program and the disclosure of newsroom spying (the Guardian may well be in Obama's sights next). Under Bush, the warrantless-wiretap program only stopped after it was publicly disclosed. In that way, the Guardian story is not a surprise, so why didn't Obama long ago acknowledge, explain, and justify such an intrusion into privacy?

Obama has promised to adjust the drone and leaks investigation policies, essentially acknowledging that his administration had gone too far in the name of security. Do you believe him?

One thing we've learned about the Bush-Obama White House is that words don't matter. Watch what they do.
.www.nationaljournal.com...

No More Secrets. How can we be a representative Republic when we do not know what our 'representatives' are doing? Secret court orders? Really? Well maybe it is time a Secret Citizens' Court sentences you traitors to our freedom to the Guillotine? How would you like that?
Governments should never Never be allowed to keep their ACTIONS secret. Want to keep details of missile sites or whatever secret, -fine- but you may not keep secret WHAT YOU DO WITH THEM. Since We the People do NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, You Are Taxing US without Representation.

reply to post by Surfrat


I am glad you stated the Bush/Obama Whitehouse!!!!! S&F for bringing some reality to the divisiveness of tribalism that has been used to separate us citizens of the US so that things like this can be slipped into play while they have most of the population fighting amongst themselves!!!

To back up my written opinion, all anyone needs to do is look up what Harry Reid had to say, "Calm down. Just calm down, this has been going on for 7 years!", and not to leave out the hypocrisy of the Republicans, Lindsey Graham said, "I don't have a problem if Verizon is doing this. If it means we are safer I am all for it"!!!!

There you go America!!!!!! So you still want to continue the fight over the left/right? Have they not proven to you that WE DO NOT MATTER??????

S & F

I saw this earlier and it 404'd me, so this was well worth the read of the obaMABUSh administration and their collective transparency.

They've been spying on us forever. The digital age just makes it easier.

reply to post by Surfrat


It is indeed the Bush-Obama White House. The two-party system has become a farce. Both parties have long since been infiltrated by the same hand. Simply, two sides of the same coin.

Economic polies towards Banks and Corporations, domestic policies eroding and infringing Constitutional Rights, and foreign policies towards globalization has continued on a steady course, becoming painfully more apparent from the Reagan Adiminstration and on.

Peace.

For those of us that remember the dark ages fo the Nixon era, I have to say that we have not change at all, the Nixon era never went away and now they have passed corrupted laws to make legal

Start looking for alternatives in all elections. We've got way too many entrenched people in DC and they are owned. Cronyism is killing us.

We have the basics, the Founders left us that. But we humans are deeply flawed and the Founders knew that as well. No politician should be allowed to make government a career. They all end up selling their souls and our freedom.

Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) announced Thursday he will introduce a bill to stop government agencies from collecting the phone records of citizens without a search warrant following reports that the National Security Agency had collected phone data on millions of Americans

reply to post by Surfrat


We American need to fight this, is imperative and first priority, the government has gone to far now when it comes on what they are doing, we asupposeuse to be a democracy no a rule under a tyranny government.

US has a major flaw in its legislative system. It allows its Congress to pass bills with no constitutionality check, which means that something can be made legal overnight, and it might take 10 years or more before it gets to the Supreme Court, to verify its constitutionality

reply to post by Surfrat


Not necessarily.

If you can prove incompetence on many levels in the Obama administration, and find how far back these bills that have been passed in previous administrations, that have lead to such corruption and tyranny, proving corruption and linking both parties and those who were Commander and Chief together , it is possible for the people to collectively, start from the beginning again or where you were lead astray,with the proper adjustments. Done in a civilized and logical manner.

Herald reporter Ryan Gallagher wrote that Raytheon had “secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites” like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.
The software is called RIOT, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology.
Raytheon told the Herald it has not sold RIOT to any clients but admitted that, in 2010, it had shared the program’s software technology with the U.S. government as part of a “joint research and development effort … to help build a national security system capable of analyzing ‘trillions of entities’ from cyberspace.”
In April, RIOT was reportedly showcased at a U.S. government and industry national security conference for secretive, classified innovations, where it was listed under the category “big data – analytics, algorithms.”