Please remind me, isn't this the land of the free? Don't we have freedom of speech? It appears as if the FBI and a bunch of other federal agencies did not get the memo. They are monitoring all of our emails every day. This is not the way freedom is preserved.
To make sure they know what is going on, the government is building storage facilities to store all of your emails even if you were writing to your Aunt Tilly. Can you imagine the amount of garbage they are storing? More frightening is the prospect that anyone, like us bloggers, will have our words come back to haunt us!
Can you imagine an out-of-control government using word searches to convict people on trumped up charges of sedition? Could you defend yourself from things you have written to a friend, no less a public forum like a blog? What if the President enacted a proclamation that says all guns needed to be collected and you said "I will go to jail before giving up my guns." Do you think the government might come calling?
Or better yet, in a personal email to a friend, you write that the President should be convicted of treason or worse, do you think you might have just put yourself into the line of fire?
The answer is you must self-monitor what you say. Yes, we mean self censor yourself unless you want the government to come after you.
Friends, we have a government which is storing emails which only means that they are going to use the information for something. Be smart and don't put yourself in the middle of a mess.
Our freedom of speech is becoming very limited. Not only cannot you yell "fire" in a theater (a good reason for limiting speech) but more importantly, try to use any racial epithet or tell a joke about a certain group and if heard by the wrong person, you will find yourself in a "sensitivity" class. What you say might have been really dumb, insensitive and make you look like a real idiot, however, isn't that each American's right?
It is only a small step from where we are today to a time where it is made illegal to criticize any elected official, including the President. We already have regulations that make it illegal to be within a 1000 feet of the President with a sign critical of him.
So watch what you write, Big Brother is watching!
Conservative Tom
The Government Has Your Emails, All Of Them
PHOTOS.COM
A National Security Administration whistle-blower said in a recent interview that the U.S. government collects massive troves of data about American citizens, which it could use against anyone it chooses.
Speaking with
RT, William Binney, a former NSA mathematician and code breaker, said that the Federal government uses a powerful data collection tool to store the contents of virtually every email sent by anyone in the Nation.
“[T]he FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the e-mails of virtually everybody in the country. And the FBI has access to it. All the congressional members are on the surveillance too, no one is excluded. They are all included. So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason — they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least,” he said.
Binney said the government is collecting the information in bulk without any regard to whether the individuals whose information is being stored is subject to criminal investigation at this time or is considered a threat to national security. According to the former NSA agent, the data is collected with a powerful information technology device called Naris which is capable of collecting all information being sent over fiber optic cables in the United States. The information is then stored in vast data collection centers where it can be searched later by Federal agents.
This sort of vast
data snooping by the Federal government was first brought to light when it was discovered that the NSA was working with AT&T to monitor customer phone and Internet activity via a secret office at the company’s headquarters. The discovery led to a lawsuit and much stonewalling by the Federal government.
Binney says government surveillance of data over fiber optic networks has increased since the first lawsuit was filed against AT&T for allowing Fed snoops to mine its data networks. He claims that under the Administration of Barack Obama the government has even had to build larger facilities to store all of the data it is collecting from Americans’ inboxes.
“They are doing more. He is supporting the building of the Buffdale facility, which is over two billion dollars they are spending on storage room for data. That means that they are collecting a lot more now and need more storage for it,” he said. “That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the electronic frontiers foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes of data. Just that current storage capacity is being advertised on the web that you can buy. And that’s not talking about what they have in the near future.”
