Yahoo! Spies for Government

Yahoo! spies.
[courtesy Google Images]

Constitution.com posted an article entitled, “‘Unconstitutional’: Yahoo secretly scanned all incoming emails for US intelligence”.

According to that article:

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“Reuters just reported that the Internet/email company Yahoo Inc. created a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails to comply with a ‘classified government directive.’

“[Yahoo!] complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.”

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A lot of people, myself included, are infuriated by Yahoo!’s betrayal of American privacy.  A lot of former Yahoo! email customers are changing to other email providers that offer “end-to-end encryption” and other technological devices that guarantee government can’t read their emails.

I’m not joining them.  I’ve had the same Yahoo! email account (alfredadask@yahoo.com) for most of 13 years and I don’t plan to change anytime soon.  After all, I really don’t have anything to hide (except the detonators, of course), so I’m not enraged by Yahoo!’s spying–in fact, I like it.

 

One “Big Brother” vs. Millions of “Little Brothers”

Yes, he is. But “Little Brothers” are also watching him.
[courtesy Google Images]

In A.D. 1949, George Orwell published his novel 1984—a dystopian view of the future. Mr. Orwell’s most frightening prediction was that “Big Brother” would install video/audio monitors in each of our homes and workplaces to constantly spy on all of us, to ensure that we didn’t deviate from the “party line”. We would always be subject to government surveillance and never have a moment of privacy for ourselves.

Orwell’s prediction was about 35 years premature. So far as I know, government has not yet installed its own video or audio recording devices in my home. Still, if you’re like me, you probably have a video camera mounted on top of your computer screen, and you wonder from time to time if the government has secretly turned it on to spy on you.

Maybe our concerns about privacy are evidence of paranoia. Maybe they’re prudent. In either case, it’s nearly undeniable that even if government hasn’t yet used our own video cameras to spy on us, it has spied on our credit card expenses, telephone and cellphone conversations, email, websites, Twitter and Facebook accounts.

There’s no question that, every day, government uses ever-more sophisticated technology to spy on us. Orwell was right. Big Brother is watching all of us.

But Orwell was also wrong in that he did not foresee that the same technology that allowed Big Brother to spy on all of us, would also become so cheap and ubiquitous that virtually all of us—the millions of “little brothers”—could also spy on Big Brother.

 

Benghazi’s Fading Memory

Four months after the Benghazi attack.
[courtesy Google Images]

According to Wikpedia,

“On the night of September 11, 2012, a heavily armed group of between 125 and 150 gunmen attacked the American diplomatic mission at Benghazi, in Libya, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and another diplomat. Several hours later in the early morning of the next day, a second assault targeted a nearby CIA annex in a different compound about one mile away, killing two embassy security personnel. Ten others were injured in the attacks which were strongly condemned by the governments of Libya, the United States, and many other countries throughout the world. . . .  The debate over the events before, during, and after the attack featured heavily in the 2012 US Presidential election. In the following months, several Republican members of Congress launched investigations, which are currently ongoing, and the topic remains a matter of great controversy, including the CIA’s presence and role at the diplomatic mission. . . . On August 6, 2013, it was reported that the U.S. had filed criminal charges against several individuals, including militia leader Ahmed Abu Khattala, for alleged involvement in the attacks.[13] To date, a few arrests have been made (none by the FBI); no one has been prosecuted.”

 

Obama’s Buggery

 

NSA Spying will expand

[courtesly Google Images]

Russia Today reports that,

 

“Former NSA chief Michael Hayden told television host Bob Schieffer of CBS’ Face the Nation that . . . not only does ending the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs seems unlikely, but he images those endeavors could expand in scope during the coming years.”

 

Death by a Thousand Leaks

Government Employees (Courtesy Google Images)

In A.D. 2010, Pfc. Bradley Manning was arrested and charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Currently, former CIA and NSA employee Edward Snowden is being pursued by the US government for also having leaked information exposing the government’s massive surveillance programs directed against the people of the United States and of foreign countries.

The revelations and scandals surrounding these leaks have infuriated significant portions of the US and EU and set the US government reeling.

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey recently reacted by saying NSA leaker Snowden’s disclosures about U.S. surveillance programs have undermined U.S. relationships with other countries and affected what he calls “the importance of trust.”

General Dempsey implied that the loss of foreign nation’s trust in the US government was not caused by the actual spying on foreign nations, but rather on Snowden’s disclosure of the spying.