Page 2 - Communications Collection Program News Today

On all of us by presidential order needed to get its periodic legal rubber stamp from the justice department and john ashcroft was wicked sick. in the hospital. he appointed big tall james comey to be the attorney general instead. it would be comy who was going to have to sign off on it. the white house tried to go to james comey to get him to sign off on it and he wouldnt and then tried to go around him and have sick john ashcroft authorize it and he raced them to john ashcrofts hospital room a...

Theres the congress that gave the administration this power. theres the administration which exercised all of that power and more and theres the court, the secret court that signed off on this incredibly broad order that allows the government to sweep up information about everybody. every phone call you make. every -- how long is that phone call? who are you calling? maybe even the location information associated with the phone call. thats a lot of data. its not just about suspected terrorists, ...

Version of the prism story also in things with "washington post" including their own chunk of the actual slides from the secret powerpoint presentation. nbc news reporting tonight that us intelligence officials are reeling tonight after all of these leaks. piercing the most sensitive secrets in the counter terror data collection operation. and this all follows the nbc report last night on this, the internal u.s. government tally and a kind of spreadsheet on a program on drone strikes in pakistan...

2007 apparently running ever since in which the nsa and fbi tap directly into the central servers of nine top internet companies grabbing en masse not just e-mails, information about when you log-on or off, documents, videos, audios, chats, skype chat, photos. it is not for people suspected of crimes, it is, at least it seems, for all of us, everything that goes through microsoft, yahoo! google, aol, skype, google and paltalc, according to classified documents by "the "washington post"," dropbox...

To have to sign off on it. the white house tried to go to james comey to get him to sign off on it and he wouldnt and then tried to go around him and have sick john ashcroft authorize it and he raced them to john ashcrofts hospital room and sat by his bed and told the fbi agents not to let anybody in or out and wouldnt let it happen. that was what that whole drama was about, whether the bush administration spying on us was being done in a legal way. the resolution of that drama ultimately the ju...

Of crimes, it is, at least it seems, for all of us, everything that goes through microsoft, yahoo! google, aol, skype, google and paltalk, according to classified documents by "the "washington post"," dropbox is soon to be coming to this program.

Person in the united states. its only targeting non-u.s. persons outside the u.s. would that be a definitive legal -- would that definitively change your assessment of the legality of what theyre doing here? >> no. i know what theyre doing here, a game theyve been playing for a while with this particular statute. this particular statute allows the government to engage in surveillance directed at people outside the united states. the deposit poingovernment poino try to reassure americans this isn...

Frankly around the world is totally out of date. when we rely on so much, the junk mail you get in your postbox has better protection than your e-mail and that stuff you pick up and throw straight in the trash is better protected by u.s. legislation than your private e-mails to your boss, to your doctor, to your children, its a shocking state of affairs. for the government to say that you shouldnt worry about it is worrying in itself. >> its hard to get that assurance on spying on phone data and...

Surveillance of americans. it seems like every time you picked up the phone, the government has known what number you were dialing. a secret surveillance program is detecting the phone calls of every single one of us. >> late last night, breaking news of the giant news story in the u.s., secret court orders never been seen before showing the nsa telling verizon that the nsa was going to collect en masse verizons telephone data. that was the big story of the day until we learned late tonight of a...

He said, quote, i never voted intentionally for any bill that would grant blanket authority to monitor every phone call. senator, apparently yes, you did. the third reaction is from members of congress who do think this is a big deal and who did know this was happening and trying to get others concerned about it. mark udall writing to the attorney general last year warning if the secret court rulings were ever made public they would stun americans saying there is now a quote significant gap betw...