So I have begun my preparations for the case. Mostly I have reviewed the constitutionality of the case, and have looked into my worthy opponents posts. I do enjoy how he clears up what exactly is happening in this case. And, with his permission, I will borrow a section of his post to clear up the confusion on my end as well.
“In the case of Jewel v. National Security Agency, a class-action lawsuit had been filed by AT&T customer Carolyn Jewel and the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the National Security Agency and high-ranking officials in the Bush Junior Administration. Their reason for filing the suit? An illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance. In short, they ‘caught’ the NSA tapping their phone calls and records for information, and they hadn’t been informed that was happening. This was based on documents provided by a former AT&T technician that showed the United States government securing data on phone calls, text messages, etc., of private citizens via AT&T.
On Jan. 21, 2010, the case was dismissed because of a lack of evidence. However, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the case on appeal on Dec. 29, 2011. A NSA whistle-blower confirmed in July of the following year that the NSA was “purposefully violating the Constitution” by spying on citizens. Or so they claimed.
In addition to this, Edward Snowden, a defense contractor and former CIA employee, leaked to The Guardian Newspaper some evidence that the government, under the Obama Administration, has a mass Internet surveillance program, called PRISM. This is not private information, and you may access information about PRISM via their website. Go ahead. Google search it 
Shortly before Snowden’s information leak, the Washington Post reported that the United States Justice Department obtained two months of phone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press. Their response? They called it a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news gathering.
It now falls to our Supreme Court to decide if Constitutional boundaries have been over-stepped by authorizing the acquisition of private communication in all forms via the Department of Justice and PRISM, after the suit issued by the Associated Press challenged our government’s defense claim and definition of national security.”
So who is under attack here? To me, it’s clear that it is the American media and the American people. To put it another way, the American people have been tapped of their information without consent, and when the media reveals the truth, the NSA attacks them and take their information and sources. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. This ruse of the Patriot Act is a far more terrifying monster than most realize.
The Patriot Act claims to protect the American people from Terror, which I will agree it does quite well. But that is all that is was meant to do. It was supposed to target only terrorist related circumstances and eliminate them. We the people did not know we we’re signing away everything that we say and post!
https://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/
Here we have a sworn declaration from Whistleblower William Binney, and man who actually worked for the NSA until he resigned in 2001. So what does he have to say about all of this?
“One of my roles at the NSA was to find a means of automating the work of human analysts. I supervised and participated in the development of a program called “Thin Thread” within the NSA. Thin Thread was designed to identify networks of connections between individuals from their electronic communications over the Internet in an automated fashion in real time. The concept was for devices running Thin Thread to monitor international communications traffic passing over the Internet. Where one side of an international communication was domestic, the NSA had to comply with the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”). With Thin Thread, the data would be encrypted (and the privacy of U.S. citizens protected) until such time as a warrant could be obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Comi.”
So far, so good. Especially that final part about encrypting the American Citizens information. Let’s continue.
“The advent of the September 11 attacks brought a complete change in the approach 18 of the NSA toward doing its job…. It was at that time that the NSA began to implement the group of intelligence activities now known as the President’s Surveillance Program (“PSP”). While I was not personally read into the PSP, various members of my Thin Thread team were given the task of implementing various aspects of the PSP. They confided in me and told me that the PSP involved the collection of domestic electronic communications traffic without any of the privacy protections built into Thin Thread.”
So there is a blatant disregard for our privacy? Thank you NSA. What else is going on?
“The NSA could have installed its intercept equipment at the nation’s fiber-optic cable landing stations. See Greg’s Cable Map, cablemap.info. There are more than two dozen such sites on the U.S. coasts where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If the NSA had taken that route, it would have been able to limit its interception of electronic communications to international/international and international/domestic communications and exclude domestic/domestic communications. Instead the NSA chose to put its intercept equipment at key junction points (for example Folsom Street) and probably throughout the nation, thereby giving itself access to purely domestic communications. The conclusion of J. Scott Marcus in his declaration that the “collection of infrastructure … has all the capability necessary to conduct large scale covert gathering of IP-based communications information, not only for communications to overseas locations, but .for purely domestic communications as well,” is correct.”
They could have limited the gathering of data to what the Patriot Act tells them to do; terrorist related activity. They had the means, and not only did they disregard it, but made it clear that they are gathering every bit of information they can. So what is happening to it all?
“…NSA’s public announcement in October 2009 that it was building a massive, $1.2 billion digital storage facility in Ft. Williams, Utah. According to some reports, the Utah facility will eventually have a data storage capacity measured in yottabytes (10^24 bytes). Even if the Utah facility were to have no more than the amount of data storage that is presently commercially available, then one would expect the data storage to be in the range of multiples often exebytes (10^18bytes)…. In April 2011, the NSA also announced that it would build a new supercomputing center at its Ft. Meade, Maryland headquarters….The amount of data that each NARUS device can process per second is large (10 gigabits is 10 billion bits). To illustrate the sheer size of the data storage capacity ofthe Utah facility, one could assume the installation of twenty-five NARUS devices in the U.S. and that all of 2 the NARUS-processed data is sent via fiber-optic cable to Utah. That means that the NARUS processing rate of 10 billion bits per second means that one machine can produce approximately 4 x 1016 bytes per year. That in turn means that it would take twenty-five devices one year to fill an exebyte or ten years to fill ten exebytes….The sheer size of that capacity indicates that the NSA is not filtering personal electronic communications such as email before storage but is, in fact, storing all that they are collecting. The capacity of NSA’s planned infrastructure far exceeds the capacity necessary for the storage of discreet, targeted communications or even for the storage of the routing information from all electronic communications. The capacity of NSA’s planned infrastructure is consistent, as a mathematical matter, with seizing both the routing information and the contents of all electronic communications.”
So Maryland and Utah receive EVERY, SINGLE BYTE OF DATA you send. Whether it is a phone call, email, text message, or video does not matter. Nor does the content, apparently. If you posted it, your entire private life would be stored on a computer in Utah for later review. I don’t know about you, but I do not promote any terrorist act in my personal life. So why does the Government get to use the Patriot Act to have my personal life at their disposal?!
But wait! There’s more! The Government and the NSA ARE NOT KEEPING YOUR INFORMATION TO THEMSELVES! THEY SHARE IT ALL OVER THE WORLD! What do I mean? I mean our Government has set up “secret treaties” with Governments all across the globe. And, as part of these “treaties”, the Government’s of these other countries HAVE FULL ACCESS TO YOUR DATA.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-personal-data-israel-documents
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-08/australian-nsa-involvement-explained/5079786
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/snowden-document-shows-canada-set-up-spy-posts-for-nsa-1.2456886
http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-is-one-of-the-nsas-9-eyes.7611.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2013/11/29/la-france-precieux-partenaire-de-l-espionnage-de-la-nsa_3522653_651865.html
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/spionage-in-deutschland-verfassungsschutz-beliefert-nsa-1.1770672
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303985504579207500439573552
Read them and weep ladies and gentlemen. Thank’s to Mr. Edward Snowden and his released of over 58,000 classified NSA documents, it is now clear that Israel, Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and Norway now all have access to your personal information. And they can access it, whenever they want. I fail to see where this became necessary under the Patriot Act. And I also fail to see where we as the American People consented to give our personal property away as part of a Governmental treated. I certainly didn’t vote for it. Did you?
And what’s more is the physical abuse of this power on American soil!
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/5049867/
Poor Ashton Lundeby was taken forcefully from his home after a computer hacker sent crank emails about bomb threats from his IP address. Ashton was denied not only his privacy by the hacker and the Government, but denied his right to Due Process because the Patriot Act deemed him a terrorist. There was not innocence until proven guilty. Ashton was a guilty terrorist. Period. And now he has been incarcerated. Where do we draw the line? Ashton was an average American, just like you or I. In the blink of an eye, thanks to the Patriot Act, any one of us can be swallowed whole and thrown in prison.
Is this what we signed up for? Is this what we agreed to as far as our “protection”. I find all of this highly unconstitutional. The Patriot Act was installed to protect us as the American people. But it sounds to me like we aren’t protected at all.
What are your thoughts on this matter? Do you agree or disagree? What proof and evidence do you have? Post a comment and I will gladly review it with you. Thank you for taking the time to read this. I will post again as the case continues to develop.