Obama Spies

Spying of the people, by the People, for the People

The people of the United States are outraged; their privacy has been utterly breached. For several years, their bio-data is being collected, their movements, their accounts, transactions, health info, spending, everything has been recorded. And now for at least the last 6 years, their phone calls are being recorded.

The Guardian revealed on Friday the 7^th, that Top-secret Prism program of National Security Authority NSA, claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Apple and Facebook.

The Guardian further revealed that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple, have all been successively added to the Prism list from September 2007 to October 2011.

A top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers to the FBI has also been revealed.

Though US officials have denied access of this program into the live, word to word conversations of people but it is said that the ‘metadata’ gained by Prism can ‘reveal someone’s name, address, driver’s license, credit history, social security number and more’. But the US government has said that the monitoring schemes it runs are necessary to defend against terrorist threats.

President Obama in his speech said he and his team actually has ‘increased safeguards on such government programs’, indicating that such programs have been running before he came. He further called upon the US citizens that his and his team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks, we can’t have a hundred percent security, and also then have a hundred percent privacy and zero inconvenience, and we’re going to have to make some choices as a society. And what I can say is, in evaluating these programs they make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity.”

Earlier Obama had said to reporters, ‘Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about’. It is clear that on the one hand Obama and his administration is denying the access intelligence agencies are having to the personal information and privacy of the American people, but on the other hand Obama is conditioning the thought of the people into accepting the state’s right of incursion and full surveillance on their every move.

According to the Guardian and the Washington Post, the NSA and the FBI have been secretly tapping directly into the central servers of nine US internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

Earlier U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in his clarification, “Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats”

The pitfall of the Obama administration and their predecessors seems to be this extremely immoral stance on part of their own people and the people of the world. They shift blame to an invisible, all-present enemy, the ‘Terrorist’, to highjack the privacy and power of their own people, getting in control of their macro and micro info; their individual transactions; and their collective trends, thereby putting the state and its agencies in a position where they can condition, manipulate, and effect their future acts.

The average American is thinking if this info will be used to safeguard them from a self-assumed enemy, or will the same info be shared with the Multinational organizations owned by the elites of their country, who will most likely use it to exploit them further. One is amazed by the thought whether this is the fruit of democracy the people of the United States deserved; does the state spy on the people in a democracy; does democracy mean the ‘will of the people’ or the conditioning of the ‘will of the people’, in other words is it the zombification of the people.

And is it not equally immoral for the US to boldly boast that the Prism is meant for spying on foreigners. Are foreigners not human, do they not have human right; spying was supposed to be a filthy game, done secretly, in limited operations, but the US has made it a billion dollars project encircling millions of its own citizens and millions abroad.

The question is, those who have entered and killed in other countries in the name of ‘Democracy’ and ‘Human Rights’, how easily they are asking their own people to enslave themselves to the will of the state. The question is; who the intelligence agencies of the US would be serving by spying upon their own people. And the ultimate question is; how do the United State and its people live up to their proclaimed dream of delivering liberty and democracy to the people of the world, when they practically deal with all others (foreigners) like they are a lesser humanity, if at all.