Our big brother surveillance state continues to expand their realm and share their information. Judge Andrew Napolitano.
How the scandal around government snooping of private data is tarnishing the President's reputation Reports of sweeping US government surveillance of Americans' phone and internet activity put the Obama administration on the defensive, adding pressure on President Barack Obama to explain why such tactics are necessary. The Washington Post reported late on Thursday that federal authorities have been tapping into the central servers of companies including Google, Apple and Facebook to gain access to emails, photos and other files allowing analysts to track a person's movements and contacts. That added to privacy concerns sparked by a report in The Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been mining phone records from millions of customers of a subsidiary of Verizon Communications. The Washington Post said the surveillance programme involving firms including Microsoft, Skype and YouTube, code-named PRISM and established under President George W Bush in 2007, had seen "exponential growth" under the Obama administration. The Telegraph's US Editor Peter Foster says President Obama, who pledged to run the most transparent administration in US history, is having reputation tarnished by the relations. "A lot of Americans would be quite surprised to see the extent to which their communications are, not being monitored, are part of an enormous matrix of data the intelligence services say they need to try and stop these terrorist attacks.
5 years ago