Category Archives: CIA
Butt Dialing Big Brother
Are we butt dialing Big Brother? Edward Snowden claims every phone call in the US is recorded by NSA.
Angela Merkel is livid at President Obama for allegedly listening in on her cell phone calls via NSA. Other EU leaders have the same complaint.
Obama Phone
Has your Obama Phone been bugged yet? Even some Dems are upset with the president over domestic spying. Not to mention some Republicans who have supported NSA surveillance in the past.
Ed Finley at the Detroit News wants Obama Phones defunded.
Clapper Trap
On Tuesday the president announced that James Clapper would head a panel to review NSA spying on American citizens. Clapper is the Supreme Spy who lied before Congress about spying on American citizens. When caught in his lie he responded that he had answered “in the least untruthful way possible”.
The administration later responded to outrage that Clapper even has a job by clarifying that rather than head the review he would merely “facilitate” it.
Clapper is also the guy who told an earlier congressional committee that the Muslim Brotherhood is a secular organization.
Tale of Two Dicks
During an interview with Charlie Rose that aired Monday the president protested again that he’s not Dick Cheney. He has a point. I haven’t heard that Cheney tried to intimidate journalists and their sources, or use the IRS to intimidate political opponents.
James Taranto, in a column titled We’re all Dick Cheney Now, says Obama is trying to send a message to his base that they were right to distrust Cheney but not to distrust him for adopting and expanding the same program of spying on Americans.
Victor Davis Hanson says, “deception is now institutionalized in the Obama administration”. He calls it, “the most untruthful cast since Nixon, Halderman, Zeigler, and John Dean”.
Police State
Poor Eric Holder. He might have saved himself a lot of trouble by simply looking up reporter James Rosen’s phone records among the records of all Verizon customers collected by the NSA, as reported in The Guardian.
That action occurred under a FISA court order and was an expansion of phone surveillance of suspected foreign terrorists which began under the Bush administration Patriot Act.
Catherine Herridge at Fox News reports that, in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied that NSA intentionally collects data on millions of Americans.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police may take DNA samples from anyone they arrest. Here’s a piece by Jeffery (the other) Rosen about Scalia’s dissent in favor of the fourth amendment.
Update: It’s not just your phone calls anymore. This morning’s Washington Post reports that the government mines your internet data too.
