NSA whistleblowers warn the U.S. government is spying on every American.

National Security Agency whistle-blowers Thomas Drake, former senior official, Kirk Wiebe, former senior analyst, and William Binney, former technical director, return to “Viewpoint” to talk about their allegations that the NSA has conducted illegal domestic surveillance. All three men are providing evidence in a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the NSA.

Drake says the spying affects “the entire country,” citing a “key decision made shortly after 9/11 which began to rapidly turn the United States of America into the equivalent of a foreign nation for dragnet blanket electronic surveillance.”

“It’s hard to believe that your government’s gonna actually do it,” Wiebe says. “That was the shocker.”

Binney mentions an NSA facility currently under construction in Bluffdale, Utah: “That facility alone can probably hold somewhere close to a hundred years’ worth of the communications of the world.” Binney continues, “Once you accumulate that kind of data — they’re accumulating against everybody — it's resident in programs that can pull it together in timelines and things like that and let them see into your life.”
http://current.com/shows/viewpoint/videos/nsa-whistle-blowers-warn-that-the-us-government-can-use-surveillance-to-see-into-your-life/
 
Sworn declaration of former NSA William Benney on NSA domestic surveillance capabilities:
http://info.publicintelligence.net/NSA-WilliamBinneyDeclaration.pdf 

Whistleblower: NSA is Quietly Building the Largest Spy Center in the Country (Video):
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/whistleblower-nsa-is-quietly-building-the-largest-spy-center-in-the-country_042012

NSA whistleblowers: Government spying on every single American. 

Speaking to Viewpoint host Eliot Spitzer, Drake said there was a “key decision made shortly after 9/11, which began to rapidly turn the United States of America into the equivalent of a foreign nation for dragnet blanket electronic surveillance.” 

Although this accusation has been supported by claims that it is for national security, says that it doesn’t stop there. In fact, warns the former NSA official, the government is giving themselves the power to put intel on every American aside for potential future crimes.

“When you open up the Pandora’s Box of just getting access to incredible amounts of data, for people that have no reason to be put under suspicion, no reason to have done anything wrong, and just collect all that for potential future use or even current use, it opens up a real danger — and to what else what they could use that data for, particularly when it’s all being hidden behind the mantle of national security,” Drake said.

Although Drake’s accusations seem astounding, they corroborate allegations launched by Binney only a week earlier. Speaking at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York City earlier in the month, Binney addressed a room of thousands by speaking about the NSA’s domestic spying. But in a candid interview with journalist Geoff Shively during HOPE, the ex-agency official admitted that things really are rather scary.

“Domestically, they're pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country and assembling that information, building communities that you have relationships with, and knowledge about you; what your activities are; what you're doing. So the government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it's a very dangerous process,” Binney claims.

Both statements from the former NSA official come on the heels of a revelation that law enforcement officers collected the cell phone records of 1.3 million Americans in 2011 alone. By carrying out this and similar requests under provisions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and using National Security Letters, though, news articles are emerging everyday suggesting that the surveillance of Americans — off the radar and under wraps — is becoming occurring more and more exponentially by the minute.
http://rt.com/usa/news/nsa-whistleblower-binney-drake-978/

Millions of Americans now fall within government's digital dragnet.
Will government surveillance finally become a political issue for middle-class Americans?

Until recently, average Americans could convince themselves they were safe from government snooping. Yes, the government engaged in warrantless wiretaps, but those were directed at terrorists. Yes, movies and TV shows featured impressive technology, with someone’s location highlighted in real time on a computer screen, but such capabilities were used only to track drug dealers and kidnappers.

Figures released earlier this month should dispel that complacency. It’s now clear that government surveillance is so widespread that the chances of the average, innocent person being swept up in an electronic dragnet are much higher than previously appreciated. The revelation should lead to long overdue legal reforms.

The new figures, resulting from a Congressional inquiry, indicate that cell phone companies responded last year to at least 1.3 million government requests for customer data—ranging from subscriber identifying information to call detail records (who is calling whom), geolocation tracking, text messages, and full-blown wiretaps.

Almost certainly, the 1.3 million figure understates the scope of government surveillance. One carrier provided no data. And the inquiry only concerned cell phone companies. Not included were ISPs and e-mail service providers such as Google, which we know have also seen a growing tide of government requests for user data. The data released this month was also limited to law enforcement investigations—it does not encompass the government demands made in the name of national security, which are probably as numerous, if not more. And what was counted as a single request could have covered multiple customers. For example, an increasingly favorite technique of government agents is to request information identifying all persons whose cell phones were near a particular cell tower during a specific time period—this sweeps in data on hundreds of people, most or all of them entirely innocent.

How did we get to a point where communications service providers are processing millions of government demands for customer data every year? The answer is two-fold. The digital technologies we all rely on generate and store huge amounts of data about our communications, our whereabouts and our relationships. And since it’s digital, that information is easier than ever to copy, disclose, and analyze. Meanwhile, the privacy laws that are supposed to prevent government overreach have failed to keep pace. The combination of powerful technology and weak standards has produced a perfect storm of privacy erosion.

Of course, police and other government investigators have legitimate needs for electronic evidence, and citizens enjoy huge benefits from new technologies. We don’t want to deprive law enforcement of the tools it needs, and we don’t want to give up our technology. The only solution is to ensure that the government’s use of these tools is carefully focused. The best way to do that is to follow the standard in the Constitution and require the government to get a warrant from a judge before intruding in our lives.

The problem is that the courts, in cases that are decades old, ruled that information held by a third party, such as a wireless carrier, was not covered by the Constitution’s warrant requirement. And the statute that sets standards for government monitoring of cell phones and online communications, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), was written in 1986, when mobile phones were the size of bricks and Facebook and Google didn’t exist. ECPA says that the government can obtain a wide range of information, including text messages and e-mail, with only a subpoena, issued without a judge’s approval. This is a much lower standard than requiring a warrant.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/millions-of-americans-now-fall-within-governments-digital-dragnet/