While I served as a senior political appointee in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations with two top secret security clearances, I had routine access to classified information. The current level of electronic spying was inconceivable in those days. Since the passage of the Homeland Security Act in 2002 — legislation that was not even read by most members of Congress before they voted for it — the federal government has exploited every legal loophole to expand its monitoring of ordinary citizens’ lives, using the “War on Terrorism” as an excuse.
As confirmed by Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) and others last week, the public is seeing only the tip of the NSA SIGINT (signals intelligence) iceberg. Under PRISM, the federal government is able to collect raw data from emails, telephone conversations, texts, videos, photos, VOIP conversations (e.g., Skype), electronic file transfers, social networking details and login details (yes, they can access your email accounts at any time). This applies to both Americans and foreign nationals. NSA computers are programmed to collect data from emails and phones containing certain keywords (for example, anything related to Cuba, regardless of whether the communication refers to a beach vacation or a violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act).
Contrary to the assertions of President Obama and other government officials, PRISM and similar highly classified programs are not used solely for anti-terrorism or anti-money laundering purposes. The federal government collects business and technical data, as well as political information. This electronic snooping has outraged Americans across the political spectrum. When Senator Rand Paul and the American Civil Liberties Union agree on an issue, and the New York Times publishes editorials similar to those in National Review, it is clear that the federal government has overstepped its constitutional bounds.
Something is very wrong in Washington, D.C. We haven’t quite reached the world imagined in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Big Brother — a.k.a. “Uncle Sam” — is definitely watching you. The federal government is becoming something very different from what the Founding Fathers envisioned.
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