By breaching the 4th Amendment,
the govt has invalidated the U.S. Constitution
(This is one of a long string of
examples)
Hat tip to Don Devine
We all know y the NSA spy complex in Utah doesn't work. Someday some
administration will come into office and abuse their power just like the IRS
did when they suppressed by targeting the TEA Party and other conservative
groups in the last election. For a matter of fact, for all we know, PRISM could
have been used in the last election to create the Administrations surprisingly
"awesome" ground game.
It is a false choice to pick the better of public safety concerns or ignoring
the 4th amendment because it is obsolete, out-dated. or just plain irrelevant.
Even if that choice is our reality, the procedure used to trash privacy rights
is best know as "hanky pank". The only way to by-pass/amend the search and
seizure laws in the 4th Amendment is to go thru the amendment process provided
by our Founding Fathers. It's known as Article V.
Since govt opted to independently violate the contract without going thru the
legal process, it has in reality, trashed the Supreme Law of the Land. The
Constitution is nothing more than a contract with we the people. As any legal
scholar can attest, when a contract has been breached, that contract (in this
case, the Constitution of the United States), it invalidated the only document
that permits their very existence. We are in fact, entering into a
post-Constitutional era controlled by a federal outlaw govt that's only reason
to exist is: might makes right.
Rich Martin
PS
Below message is not new news. but makes a great reminder how our govt lost
it's right to exist.
Phone
records could end up at NSA’s Utah Data Center
By Thomas Burr
| The Salt Lake
Tribune
First Published Jun 06
2013 02:36 pm • Last Updated Jun 07 2013 06:28 am
Washington » Phone
records of millions of Americans could end up flowing into the National
Security Agency’s Utah Data Center this fall, though outraged members of
Congress are already calling for the government to halt such a broad
seizure of private information.
Senate Intelligence
Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein acknowledged Thursday that the NSA had
obtained secret court orders for seven years to collect records of calls placed
or received on Verizon phones, and defended
the practice as vital to national security efforts.
Related Stories
* White House defends collecting phone records
Published June 6, 2013
* Beyond Verizon: NSA gets data from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook
Published June 6, 2013
* Intelligence chief blasts NSA document leaks
Published June 6, 2013
* Tech companies deny providing direct access to NSA through PRISM
Published June 7, 2013
* Obama defends government surveillance programs
Published June 7, 2013
* But wait, there’s more: An NSA Q&A
Published June 7, 2013
At a glance
It’s called protecting
America," she said, responding to a report in the Guardiannewspaper, which
obtained and published a classified court order for Verizon to hand over all
"telephony metadata" — info such as
telephone numbers and the length of the call — from the United States to
foreign countries and from domestic, local-only calls.
House Intelligence
Chairman Mike Rogers said the phone program had thwarted at least one domestic
terrorist plot in recent years.
But the revelation of
the widespread snooping brought a swift reaction from those critical of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret judicial body that issued the
Verizon order.
"The National
Security Agency’s seizure and surveillance of virtually all of Verizon’s phone
customers is an astounding assault on the Constitution," said Sen. Rand
Paul, R-K.Y.
The Utah Data Center,
a massive data farm set to open this fall, is expected to cull billions of
bytes of information for the nation’s intelligence community, though NSA
officials won’t offer details about the information or how it is gathered.
—
How broad? »Rep. Jason Chaffetz called the collection of
domestic phone records "unnerving" and demanded answers from the
White House and NSA. The Utah Republican noted that if there’s a court order
for Verizon, there are probably similar ones for other major carriers as well.
That said, Chaffetz
noted that the Utah Data Center is simply a place to warehouse information and
the questions should be focused at the officials who decided to pry into the
phone records.
Behold the NSA’s Dark
Star: the Utah Data Center
by Clive Irving Jun
8, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
It’s the ultimate machine of what’s become our Paranoid
State. Clive Irving on the Orwellian mass-surveillance data center rising in
the Utah desert.
Remember the Stasi, the secret
police who operated in East Germany when it was a communist state? When the
Berlin Wall came down, East Germans discovered they had been living in a
society so rotted by paranoia that at least one in three of its adult citizens
were spying on the other two.
NSA's Utah Data Center
shown June 6, in Bluffdale, Utah. (Rick Bowmer/AP)From this springs
what I call the Stasi Principle: a state’s appetite
for collecting intelligence expands in direct relationship to its technical
ability to do so.
In the case of East Germany, this ended up
producing warehouses stuffed with bulging files containing the minutely
observed details of the everyday, humdrum lives of millions. The product was
both banal and, in its range and results, terrifying (a world caught
beautifully in
the film The Lives of Others).
In the case of the U.S., the apotheosis of
the same mind-set lies in a sprawling complex at Camp Williams, Utah, due to
start operating this fall. Billions of dollars have gone into creating this
cyberintelligence facility for the National
Security Agency.
There’s no official explanation of the Utah
Data Center’s real mission, except that it’s the largest of a network of data
farms including sites in Colorado, Georgia, and Maryland. But it’s obviously
been built to vastly increase the agency’s capacity to suck in, digest,
analyze, and store whatever the intelligence community decides to collect. As
of this week, we know a lot more about the kind of data that includes.
Of course, the U.S. is still far from being
the police state that East Germany was. But I do think we need to better
understand how this technological juggernaut works, what its scope really
is—and particularly we need to appreciate how our political acceptance of this
scale of surveillance is shaping the kind of society we are.
The national-security industrial complex is
now of the size, power, and influence of the military-industrial complex of the
Cold War, which President Eisenhower first defined and warned of. As then, this
complex uses the national interest as a reason for having to operate in
secrecy, and invokes patriotism—literally in the PATRIOT Act—to create a
political consensus.
Nineteen terrorists with minimal
technology—box cutters—have enabled the counterterrorism industry to enjoy
unbounded reach. White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest used the
familiar argument to defend the newly disclosed surveillance: it was, he said,
“a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats as it allows
counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists
have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terror
activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”
The Utah Data Center
is part of “a network of data farms” in the U.S. (Rick Bowmer/AP)Where is it
absolutely essential to violate privacy
and where not?
That’s actually a simplification.
Surveillance has two fundamental purposes: to track the known and discover the
unknown. It’s hard to comprehend the science involved. How, for example, do you
cull billions of bytes of data a second in a way that discriminates between the
useless and the essential? Only one thing is for sure, and that is that the
policy driving the velocity of the NSA’s ever-expanding sweeps is first to make
those sweeps as global and indiscriminate as possible and then to apply
algorithms able to instantly see the significant from the insignificant. If
only it were that simple.
It is patently easy to defend the resources
devoted to intelligence gathering by saying that many attacks have been
thwarted,
without saying what and where they were. Neither the Boston Marathon atrocity
nor the London assassination of a British soldier were detected in advance,
even though intelligence services in both countries had
the perpetrators on their radar.
There is a certain kind of intellectual
depravity in trying to have us accept that all surveillance is good for us.
Politicians of both parties who now say there is nothing new in what has been
revealed, that this was all authorized and kosher, are captives of this
depravity, because they don’t really know any more than we do where to draw the
line. Where is it absolutely essential to violate privacy and where not?
This is made even worse by the cover of
enormous technical complexity. At least the Stasi’s low-tech methods could be
seen for what they were, part of a cumbersome and gross bureaucratic machine,
essentially human in its systems, allowing culpability to be clearly assigned.
In our case there is the Dark Star factor,
like the Utah operation, working on robotic principles, not dependent on
putting bugs in chandeliers, leaving no fingerprints, and capable of awesome
penetration. We have the ultimate machine of the Paranoid State, an Orwellian
apparatus that intoxicates its operators with its efficiency, enthralls its
masters with its omniscience, and emasculates its political overseers with its
promise of efficacy.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/08/behold-the-nsa-s-dark-star-the-utah-data-center.html
Ludwig Von Mises quotes
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of
chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course
others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!”
--Patrick Henry
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of
patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson
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