NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You

[Huey P. Long]

NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You
By Spencer Ackerman

The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so.

That claim comes in a short letter sent Monday to civil libertarian Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. The two members of the Senate’s intelligence oversight committee asked the NSA a simple question last month: under the broad powers granted in 2008?s expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, how many persons inside the United States have been spied upon by the NSA?

The query bounced around the intelligence bureaucracy until it reached I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S. spy agencies. In a letter acquired by Danger Room, McCullough told the senators that the NSA inspector general “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons,” McCullough wrote.

“All that Senator Udall and I are asking for is a ballpark estimate of how many Americans have been monitored under this law, and it is disappointing that the Inspectors General cannot provide it,” Wyden told Danger Room on Monday. “If no one will even estimate how many Americans have had their communications collected under this law then it is all the more important that Congress act to close the ‘back door searches’ loophole, to keep the government from searching for Americans’ phone calls and emails without a warrant.”

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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/nsa-spied/

[hifiguy]

1. I can't figure out if George Orwell is

shaking his head, laughing, or spinning in his grave at 10,000 rpm when I read this

[Huey P. Long]

2. We will watch this sink here too. Those who were so against this are now fucking silent.

[Odin2005]

8. Ditto.

[Huey P. Long]

5. Thats is a great article...one that will not be read by the hear see speak no evil crowd.

[librechik]

4. Orwell....Paging George Orwell. n/t

[Rex]

7. Nonsense...more gibberish from Big Brother.

Grasping at straws to define why they should still get a paycheck. Doesn't the DHS mean we don't need several thousand overpaid suits breaking the law at light speed? Now we have just one agency that can violate our rights! We don't need 12!

[2on2u]

9. Now watch this.....

bomb, anthrax, president, 747, airport, C-4, dynamite, camel, radical, fatwa, infidel, blah, blah blah, I just got entered in the sweepstakes. It's fun and easy and every single email, news article, phone conversation, text, pdf and so forth should contain all of them so the snow will be so thick that none of it matters anymore.




http://www.nsawatch.org/eaves101.html
Just how many schoolteachers and other innocent Americans have been investigated as a result of "The Program"? And just how much privacy invasion are they subject to before the FBI can conclude they are not "involved in international terrorism"?

[Huey P. Long]

10. interesting. -eom