President Obama on Tuesday defended the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs in a wide-ranging interview on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," arguing that the agency doesn’t target U.S. civilians.
“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama said, according to the media pool report. “What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack...That information is useful.”
Obama called the surveillance programs “a critical component to counterterrorism,” but acknowledged that they’ve “raised a lot of questions for people.”
The NSA’s surveillance programs, first uncovered when former contractor Edward Snowden divulged details to The Guardian, have been the focus of a renewed debate since a weekend terror threat had top administration officials huddling at the White House, and provoked the State Department to close more than 20 diplomatic posts and issue a worldwide travel alert.
A woman was just visited by FBI because she googled "pressure cooker".
"...it does raise some interesting question about exactly what kind of Internet surveillance is going on out there. Quite obviously, the FBI would not have shown up at the Catalano home if some connection had not been made between Google searches conducted several weeks in the past, their IP address, and eventually their home address. On a basic level, this would seem to require; (1) that there is a program out there monitoring seemingly random Google searches by American citizens, (2) that this program allows the government to track IP addresses, or obtain them from Google by some means, and (3) that they were then able to connect the IP address to a home address, presumably with information obtained from whichever company happens to provide the Catalano’s with their internet access."
We're in this weird place where the public doesn't care so much if their guy is lying so long as he's their guy and he's in power. The standard for public service has been forever polluted. Let's find a new America, someplace we can start over!
Unfortunately, that would also devolve to liars and depots. It's called human nature. On an upbeat, however, Mark Levin is coming out with a new book next week, the Liberty Amendments; it's a planned 'activist' grassroots way to fix and restore this once wonderful Constitutional Republic to its Constitutional foundation. I say let's have a look see and a go at that. I've got the book pre-ordered, and I'll post his Constitutional Amendment suggestions here. He is saying that Article V empowers 3/4 of the states to adopt Amendments, making an end-run around the tyrannical Congress and president. Their permission or agreement is expressly unnecessary. This will be work, but what else is left?