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The WSJ is reporting that in addition to monitoring cell phone records, emails and web activity, the National Security Agency is monitoring credit card transactions. "NSA has established similar relationships with credit-card companies, three former officials said."
Honestly, Obama is FAR worse than Bush Jr in almost every respect, boggles the mind that anyone supports him.
NSA Monitoring Actually Includes Three Top Phone Companies ... And Credit Card Data
On Wednesday we learned the NSA is still collecting phone call information from Verizon customers, and now the Wall Street Journal reports that the agency is also indiscriminately culling data from AT&T and Spring Nextel Corp. subscribers.
It's unclear what the scope of the credit-card data collection was, or if it's still ongoing, but considering the quick pace of government surveillance leaks in the past day, we should know soon enough. (The New York Times notes, "The extraordinary revelations, in rapid succession, also suggested that someone with access to high-level intelligence secrets had decided to unveil them in the midst of furor over leak investigations.")
The NSA's efforts have become institutionalized—yet not so well known to the public—under laws passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most members of Congress defended them Thursday as a way to root out terrorism, but civil-liberties groups decried the program.
The arrangement with Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, the country's three largest phone companies means, that every time the majority of Americans makes a call, NSA gets a record of the location, the number called, the time of the call and the length of the conversation, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Obama administration, which inherited and embraced the program from the George W. Bush administration, moved Thursday to forcefully defend it.
...
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, phone records were collected without a court order as a component of the Bush-era warrantless surveillance program authorized by the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which permitted the collection of business records, former officials said.
Originally posted by obixman
Well the difference is in NCIS (or other shows) not only do they get the information in seconds.... but the information is always correct.
I've been dealing with "big data" inside a corporation where all the info is sourced internally and getting the matches to properly work is always a struggle. Just matching things up blindly is how (for example) wells in Colorado end up being mapped in North Dakota.
Substitute people and see the effect.
Disgusting to see Obama continuing the policies of Bush. He had a chance to reform a broken system, but all he's done is keep it running.
Well, that's one relief: they don't get the content of the calls.
Originally posted by butcherguy
He's done a bit more than 'keep it running'.
He has expanded it.
Greatly.
PRISM is a top secret electronic surveillance program run by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) since 2007.
...PRISM replaced the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which was implemented in the wake of the September 11 attacks under the George W. Bush Administration. While the Terrorist Surveillance Program was widely criticized and had its legality questioned because it was not conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, PRISM was authorized by an order of the Court.
Originally posted by MaxSteiner
The Total Information Awareness Initiative under a different name:
en.wikipedia.org...
Honestly, Obama is FAR worse than Bush Jr in almost every respect, boggles the mind that anyone supports him.