• Tag Archives NSA

  • German government outraged by US snooping scandal

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The German government is demanding explanations from the US after it emerged that its secret spying programme Prism collected more information from Germany than any other EU country.

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to raise the issue when she receives US President Barack Obama in Berlin next week, her spokesman said on Monday (10 June).

    Data privacy is a very sensitive topic in Germany and the cluelessness of Merkel’s government about the affair may become an issue in September’s elections.

    “Everything we know we found out from the media,” interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said on Tuesday in a press conference in Berlin.

    Its head of domestic intelligence, Hans-Georg Maassen, standing beside Friedrich, added: “I knew nothing about it.”

    The ministry of interior is working on a questionnaire for the US government to find out the extent and the legal basis for the collection of data from Germany, he added.

    Similar information requests will be sent to Internet firms such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Apple, which were targeted by Prism, but which deny that US security staff got unlimited access to their servers.

    Germany’s hawkish interior minister – a Bavarian Christian-Social politician whose party is standing for re-election both on regional and national level in September – also indicated that US and German intelligence services co-operate well and that Prism might have “indirectly” helped Germany to prevent terrorist attacks.

    Meanwhile, German justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a Liberal politician, wrote in an op-ed for Spiegel Online that reports about Prism are “deeply worrying” and “dangerous.”

    She contradicted US leader Barack Obama, who recently said you cannot have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy at the same time.

    “I do not share this view. A society is less free, the more its citizens are being surveilled, controlled and scrutinised. In a democratic system, security is not an end itself, but a means to ensure freedom,” she wrote.

    Full article: http://euobserver.com/justice/120455


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  • Rand Paul says NSA phone records seizure saps Obama’s ‘moral authority’

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Speaking one day before President Barack Obama meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in California, Paul said the NSA program, the controversy around IRS treatment of conservative groups, and other recent government actions sap America’s “moral authority” to urge Beijing to embrace democratic reforms and openness.

    “I’m appalled,” Paul told Yahoo at the start of a wide-ranging exclusive interview in a conference room down the hall from his office.

    “I’m not opposed to them going to a judge and getting an order for an individual who you have probable cause to believe that they’ve been involved with a crime,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t want to go after terrorists or rapists or murderers or any kind of terrible criminal. It’s that I want to go after them, not the rest of the law-abiding citizens that are out there.”

    “It’s a great invasion of our privacy,” Paul said, calling the NSA activities a violation of the Bill of Rights and insisting that the officials involved need “remedial eduction” in Constitutional protections.

    via Rand Paul says NSA phone records seizure saps Obama’s ‘moral authority’.


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  • Amash Leads Letter to NSA, FBI on Phone Tracking

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Washington, D.C. Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) led a bipartisan coalition of House members in a letter to the NSA and FBI demanding more information about the government’s telephone tracking program.

    The Guardian reported late last night that a secret surveillance court has ordered a Verizon subsidiary continuously to turn over “telephony metadata” to the NSA, the Defense Department agency that is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence.

    The leaked secret court order reveals that data associated with potentially tens of millions of Americans have been handed over to the NSA, including telephone numbers, the time and duration of calls, and geolocation data. It is not known whether the transmitted information includes data about Internet use.

    “The astonishing amount of information the government is secretly seizing from Americans should shock anyone who has even a passing interest in privacy, civil liberties, or the Constitution,” said Amash. “The government is vacuuming up data on every call made by every customer of a major phone company. This sort of sweeping surveillance is not even plausibly authorized by statute, let alone the Constitution.”

    Twenty-one Representatives signed the letter to Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI, and Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA. The letter asks for specific information about the government’s surveillance, including the frequency of the practice and the agencies’ legal justification.

    via Amash Leads Letter to NSA, FBI on Phone Tracking.


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