Report: Documents reveal details behind AT&T-NSA partnership

Under a decades-old program with the government, telecom giant AT&T; in 2003 led the way on a new collection capability that the National Security Agency said amounted to a “‘live’ presence on the global net” and would forward 400 billion Internet metadata records in one of its first months of operation, The New York Times reported. The Fairview program was forwarding more than 1 million emails a day to the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the newspaper reported. Meanwhile, the separate Stormbrew program, linked to Verizon and the former company MCI, was still gearing up to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic.

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Hunting for Hackers, N.S.A. Secretly Expands Internet Spying at U.S. Border

Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents. --In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

Read more at the New York Times
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Senate rejects NSA amendments

The Senate has rejected all three controversial amendments from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to legislation reforming the National Security Agency (NSA), edging closer to sending the bill to President Obama's desk. The first amendment from McConnell, rejected in a 42-56 vote, would have changed the structure of a new expert panel created by the USA Freedom Act to weigh in one some matters before the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees spying matters.

Read more at The Hill
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X DARPA Director & Google Exec Pushes Microchipping Human Beings

With the recent revelations by NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden, it’s no secret that we live on a planet characterized by mass surveillance and virtually zero privacy. We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with the idea that we face threats, that a high level of national security is needed in order to keep us safe. Think about it, the United States pumps a large majority of their money into the Department of Defence. A state of fear, war and terror is needed to keep those funds flowing in that direction. Many people are starting to wake up and realize a lot of the so called threats we face and have been facing are largely manufactured and fabricated in order to justify a specific agenda, agendas that deal with the black budget world.

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NSA performed warrantless searches on Americans' calls and emails – Clapper

US intelligence chiefs have confirmed that the National Security Agency has used a "back door" in surveillance law to perform warrantless searches on Americans’ communications. The NSA's collection programs are ostensibly targeted at foreigners, but in August the Guardian revealed a secret rule change allowing NSA analysts to search for Americans' details within the databases.  Now, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has confirmed for the first time the use of this legal authority to search for data related to “US persons”.

Read more at the Guardian UK
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What We Lose if We Give Up Privacy

Peggy Noonan - What is privacy? Why should we want to hold onto it? Why is it important, necessary, precious? ✧ Is it just some prissy relic of the pretechnological past? ✧ We talk about this now because of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency revelations, and new fears that we are operating, all of us, within what has become or is becoming a massive surveillance state. They log your calls here, they can listen in, they can read your emails. They keep the data in mammoth machines that contain a huge collection of information about you and yours. This of course is in pursuit of a laudable goal, security in the age of terror. ✧ Is it excessive? It certainly appears to be. Does that matter? Yes. Among other reasons: The end of the expectation that citizens' communications are and will remain private will probably change us as a people, and a country.

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