Americans aren’t shrugging over NSA surveillance

[DJ MC]

At first blush, it seemed, most Americans haven’t gotten too exercised about the revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly tracking everyone’s phone data, in the name of protectingnational security.

 

That was the take-away from a Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll released Tuesday. But two new polls out Wednesday – one by Gallup, another by YouGov taken for The Economist – paint a difference picture. Both find that a majority of Americans disapprove of the NSA data-mining programs.

 

In the Gallup poll, conducted June 10 and 11, 53 percent of Americans disapprove of the programs, while 37 percent approve. YouGov found that 59 percent disapprove of the programs, and only 35 percent approve.

 

Read more: Source

 

 

It was only a matter of time before someone leaked information about this. Things are just getting interesting.

[MHV9218]

I love the hypocrisy going on right now. The so-called Liberals who jumped all over Bush for this are defending Obama and calling Snowden a traitor, while the so-called Conservatives who defended Bush the whole time are all over Obama as if this is a new policy. There are about three people in Washington who stick to their word and beliefs over politics, and I think one of them is Obama's dog.

[realizm]

So you can only imagine how the NSA is, as we speak, tracking users on the internet because that is one of the functions of the top secret agency, as internet watchdogs in the era of internet espionage. At one point the confidentiality of it's existence was more enforced than certain divisions of the CIA. Google it, the information is there believe it or not, amazingly enough.

 

This is not shocking to me at all, old news to me. Could care less, I'm going to say it as it is.

[R10 2952]

Well, it's about time people in this country woke the hell up, so I guess this is good news.

[Orion VII 4 Life]

I love the hypocrisy going on right now. The so-called Liberals who jumped all over Bush for this are defending Obama and calling Snowden a traitor, while the so-called Conservatives who defended Bush the whole time are all over Obama as if this is a new policy. There are about three people in Washington who stick to their word and beliefs over politics, and I think one of them is Obama's dog.

Gotta agree with you, this is all about politics on both sides, it's OK when their guy does it but not when their opponent does it. I'm personally conservative and was never for it even under Bush, hell there's a ton of things Bush did that I don't approve of.

[realizm]

The fact of the matter is that the NSA maintains a database containing literally hundreds of billions of records of telephone calls made by U.S. citizens from the largest carriers such as AT&T and Verizon. (Anyone uses FiOS?)

The amazing thing is that existence of this database and the NSA program that compiled it was unknown to the general public until USA Today brought this to light in 2006. It was cited that the database contains over 1.9 trillion call-detail records. The efforts at monitoring calls (and I'm assuming even social media, scary, I know) began about seven months before the September 11, 2001 attacks.

So what does the records include? Call information such as: caller, receiver, date/time of call, length of call, etc etc) for use in what is refered to as traffic analysis and social network analysis. apparently though they do not include audio information or transcripts of the content of the phone calls.

These actions on the part of this agency are in fact illegal and warrantless searches without approval of the courts and on top of that not only a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Thank you George Bush for signing that PATRIOT ACT. Which gives the US goverment the ability, all in all, the power to nullify the US Constitution and institute martial law at will.

Think I'm kidding?

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-06/nsa-said-to-collect-millions-of-verizon-phone-records.html

http://go.bloomberg.com/political-capital/2013-06-10/internet-reaction/

 

The National Security Agency has taken the Internet by storm, and this time, Internet users know it. Since news of a once-secret U.S. electronic surveillance program was first reported by the Guardian and the Washington Post last week, the NSA has been trending with the best of them.

 

[Harry]

This is all just another big distraction to cover the really big problems and enactments going on that they don't want American's to know about.

[Turbo19]

More propaganda it seems.

 

I'll tell you this much, they'll be wasting valuable time and money if they go looking up my personal info.

[Trainmaster5]

This is all just another big distraction to cover the really big problems and enactments going on that they don't want American's to know about.

I'm glad someone else sees this my way. The US government has been doing this since at least WWII with Germans and Japanese the targets back then. In the 1950's "commies" were the target. In the sixties and seventies civil rights leaders and so-called radical groups were targeted. Remember the FBI and" cointelrpro"? Suddenly a bunch of ignorant citizens are up in arms because it's them who are caught up in the dragnet. As long as it was the jihadists, street gangs or cartels in the government crosshairs it was OK,? For what it's worth what did the average American citizen think the end result of the Patriot Act would be? IMO the Patriot Act is unconstitutional in whole or in part but the Democrats and Republicans all voted for it. I hear people saying their privacy is being violated and I laugh. You gave up that right when you got a landline phone. You lost some more when you got your first credit card. Have a transit ID/pass or gov't ID ? Ditto. EZPass ? Internet access through an ISP? Your precious Iphone, IPad, Android, or Windows phone? The government has had the ability track you if you have anything I've mentioned. Being older than most forum members I've assumed the US government has been playing "Big Brother" or has had the ability to do so since the day I was born. Those that have just begun to protest and question the legality of the NSA's actions must have been asleep for the past half century. Either that or they're dumb as a box of rocks, IMO. While these agencies methods are now coming to light what did the average American think the NSA and the like were set up for? Carry on.

[CenSin]

The so-called Liberals

Let me qualify that for you: liberal politicians. But it seems that party lines don't divide opinion on mass surveillance, becaues almost al lthe politicians defended it. Citizens, on the other hand, are mostly against it.

[realizm]

This is all just another big distraction to cover the really big problems and enactments going on that they don't want American's to know about.

 

Hold the phone, I see what you are saying. Another example of this was the hype in the 1990's over the so called  Roswell Incident and Area 51. What was eventually revealed was that this hype about 'aliens' being contained in a secret base in Nevada was in fact a LIE: The CIA used this as a cover up to hide top secret military projects from the Soviets during the Cold War. Such as the now retired F-117 Stealth Fighter which was developed and tested at that location.

 

Makes one wonder what is the real intent of the revealing of this information to the public!

[CenSin]

You gave up that right when you got a landline phone.

True. A landline is the dumbest place to throw your secrets. But technology in the reach of the average citizen is now available to thwart surveillance. Everything that can be tapped and traced by the government has an equivalent that is difficult, uneconomical, or nearly impossible to tap or trace. Each of those equivalents has the power to stop surveillance in its tracks if it reaches critical mass adoption by the genral public.

 

I'm talking about stuff like these:

• Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption which was created specifically for the purpose of enabling secure electronic communication, especially through traditionally insecure plaintext mediums like e-mail and instand messaging.
• The Onion Router (Tor) network which was—ironically—created by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to allow dissidents to communicate anonymously over the public internet and bypass censorship. Dissidents within many opressive regimes have found it indispensible to their cause. Dissidents within the U.S., will no doubt find it useful as well.
• Virtual Private Networking (VPN) is a technology that enables one to connect to a network securely to use that network's resources. Commonly, it is used by corporations to allow employees to access files from home or their mobile devices as if they were working on the company's premises. VPN services have also been offered by various companies to the public to enable anyone to connect to them and use the internet without any third party knowing the real IP address of the person connecting. VPN services are tricky, and the safest VPNs are those that don't keep traces of any activity, and those that are not based in the United States. (Sweden comes to mind.)
• Full Disk Encryption (FDE) is a term referring to the encryption of the entirely of a storage device making casual lifting of the data inside a pain in the ass. The most useful form of this is the self-encrypting drive. The use of such a drive requires a BIOS capable of supporting password entry during boot to be passed onto the drive as well as a drive that has hardware encryption built-in. Currently, these drives are sold by SAMSUNG (with more from the competition to follow suite, no doubt).

Still other yet-to-be-developed solutions are within reach in the near future, provided someone puts in the effort to develop them. Of importance in particular are:

• Secure mobile phones operating systems need to be widely deployed. Android is a good place to start developing one. These phones need to encrypt and route voice and video calls through a decentralized network, and optionally provide access to the traditional landline or mobile telephone network. (The traditional networks are insecure, but people will not adopt secure technologies easily without any form of bakwards compatibility.) Skype could have been such a solution, but it is not secure! Microsoft (and by extension, any government that Microsoft obeys) can tap the contents of the message.
• A good cryptocurrency needs to be developed or settled on (since there are many competing ones right now). Cryptocurrencies enable commerce that is out of the control of government regulations and financial institutions. They provide the anonymity of cash, and the convenience of online commerce.
• Public WiFi or broad swathes of unlincensed spectrum for mass communications are needed as a basis for anonymous mobile communication, because centralized carriers of any form of communication are a threat to privacy. As long as you are paying a company to carry your data—like Verizon, a record of where you've been (using cellphone towers to triangulare your position), when you connected, and what you sent or received will be tracked and they will know who did it.

[Roadcruiser1]

Your best bet is to say the liberal politicians are actually communists in disguise. That sir would be accurate.

[Turbo19]

Your best bet is to say the liberal politicians are actually communists in disguise. That sir would be accurate.

Personally I wouldn't find that accurate at all.

 

 

As with the majority of blanket statements I think this one is very fallacious.

[Urbanfortitude]

Your best bet is to say the liberal politicians are actually communists in disguise. That sir would be accurate.

Look up communism.  Get back to us.

 

 

Anyway I'm surprised.  I mean how can anyone just be figuring this all out?  I've always found it believable that the government/NSA would have ways of keeping track of what we do on the internet and over the phone.  How sensible is to just throw all these ways of communication at us and not think anyone is keeping track of what's going on?  I mean honestly when I heard about this I was seriously like "so what else is new?".  Shows just how asleep the country is really.

[realizm]

On the Firefox homepage this morning as all of us saw. Kudos for not holding back any punches!

 

Screenshot:

 

[MHV9218]

Your best bet is to say the liberal politicians are actually communists in disguise. That sir would be accurate.

 

I give up.

[Orion VII 4 Life]

"Free wifi for everyone" is gonna be monitored heavily and certain sites the government agency running it doesn't agree with will be blocked. They'll get away with it too, since it'll all be in the fine print you agree with when you first log in. Unfortunately, once it comes the government will succeed with complete internet censorship. Few people will pay for their own, unfiltered connection so Verizon, Time Warner and so on will eventually just stop offering their internet services and people will be stuck with Socialist Online. SOL, like AOL but paid for by our tax dollars and approved by your friendly government!

 

Your best bet is to say the liberal politicians are actually communists in disguise. That sir would be accurate.

If only more people would realize that...

[Turbo19]

If only more people would realize that...

Then it would be more than sufficient evidence to prove that over 50% of the population are ignorant gullible individuals that should keep out of politics.

 

 

 

As of now we can only speculate that, purely out of common decency.

 

 

[Orion VII 4 Life]

Then it would be more than sufficient evidence to prove that over 50% of the population are ignorant gullible individuals that should keep out of politics.

 

 

 

As of now we can only speculate that, purely out of common decency.

 

 

You're right, they are. Look up videos on YouTube asking Obama supporters why they're voting for him. Absolutely no one knew what they were talking about! "Obama gives money to us because he loves us, it's his own money he got it somehow" or "Obama got rid the patriot act/got us out of the recession/etc.", real idiots.

 

This country is so stupid that they elect their leaders based on race, religion, or simply who big media tells them to. Such a shame that people can't have knowledge and make up their own minds. I honestly don't care what your political beliefs are as long as you actually do your homework.

[Turbo19]

You're right, they are. Look up videos on YouTube asking Obama supporters why they're voting for him. Absolutely no one knew what they were talking about! "Obama gives money to us because he loves us, it's his own money he got it somehow" or "Obama got rid the patriot act/got us out of the recession/etc.", real idiots.

 

This country is so stupid that they elect their leaders based on race, religion, or simply who big media tells them to. Such a shame that people can't have knowledge and make up their own minds. I honestly don't care what your political beliefs are as long as you actually do your homework.

Fair enough, but supporters of a particular candidate don't necessarily reflect the entire group of supports, let alone the entire political party the candidate is affiliated with. 

[CenSin]

You never know the politicians' beliefs until it's too late. Obama seems to not be the Saviour people thought he was anymore.

[Turbo19]

You never know the politicians' beliefs until it's too late. Obama seems to not be the Saviour people thought he was anymore.

Oh yes, because Barack Obama was going to instantly pull the country out of the recession, create jobs seemingly out of nowhere and create a better financial situation for everyone, thus reversing the economic collapse created in Bush's last term.

 

People need to get real with this shit. I have never in U.S. Politics seen so many citizens place this much pressure on the President of The United States of America until Barack took office in 2008.

[Q10 Airport]

You never know the politicians' beliefs until it's too late. Obama seems to not be the Saviour people thought he was anymore.

 

It's rather difficult to be the savior when quite a few of his policies are vastly similar to his unpopular predecessor.

[Turbo19]

It's rather difficult to be the savior when quite a few of his policies are vastly similar to his unpopular predecessor.

And for that I fault Congress and nothing else. If the administration was given just a slight amount of leverage than perhaps all these so called "empty promises" could be fulfilled.