The Freedom Act signed into law by US President Barack Obama last week will do nothing to affect the continued mass data collection under the PRISM program run jointly by the US National security Agency and the UK's GCHQ intelligence service, according to sources.
The Freedom Act ended the system exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who revealed that the US spy agency collected and searched records of phone calls. The passing of the Act was hailed as the most significant curb on the government's investigative authorities since the 1970s. But sources close to the NSA say it's practically inconsequential in the universe of the NSA's vast digital spying operations and its major project, PRISM.
[source : US Spy Agency Sources Say Freedom Act Will Not Stop Mass Data Program, Sputnik, http://sputniknews.com/military/20150608/1023077038.html, 8th June 2015]
If there are two newspapers who were trying desperately to drag Obama into attacking Syria in 2013 it was The Guardian and The Washington Post, particularly the latter which would publish two editorials per week demanding that Obama attack Syria. And when the incident of 21st August 2013 occured and the subsequent agreement that Syria would relinquish its chemical weapons, it was The Guardian who relentlessly with blinkers accused Assad of using chemical weapons and was ecstatic about Syria giving up its chemical weapons while not mentioning once Israel's much more powerful and destructive arsenal of nuclear weapons.
I have always said that they wanted you to know you were being spied on. That's why these two establishment newspapers slapped The Snowden Revelations on their front pages for weeks and weeks.
But have either exposed the plan revealed to General Wesley Clark for war and regime change in seven countries in five years? It has been mentioned in comments to articles but not by any journalist.
So why would they want you to know you were being spied on?
Glenn Greenwald put it so nicely: surveillance breeds conformity.
People will behave as they are expected to if they know they are under surveillance. They will be good little citizens, obeying the law, paying their taxes, supporting wars, hating the newest enemy, etc.
But there is something else to all this, and that it is that what was once illegal is now legal. From the same report:
The only reason the NSA didn't propose keeping the records with the phone companies years ago, former NSA Director Keith Alexander has said, is that no one wanted to seek legislation from Congress while the program remained a secret.
I would also recommend reading the article from which this is taken:
In reality, as the World Socialist Web Site wrote after the bill’s passage, “The bill—which has received the endorsement of the Obama administration and war criminals such as CIA Director John Brennan—is not an effort to curtail the vast and illegal activities of the US intelligence agency, but rather a means of ensuring that these activities can continue, now with a pseudo-legal foundation that has been explicitly endorsed by Congress.”
...The actions of the Obama administration, however, are aimed not at restricting or stopping illegal government surveillance, but rather at bamboozling the public into believing that the government has stopped spying on them.
[source : Edward Snowden lends his support to “USA Freedom Act”, WSWS, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/06/snow-j06.html, 6th June 2015]
And with the rise of Islamic State, which was facilitated by NATO, the powers being granted to the spies are getting and Bigger and BIGGER!!
Australia and Canada are expanding their spy powers due to some dodgy incidents involving alleged Islamic terrorists.
And in the UK, the T4 Tories are planning on ripping up all privacy rights.
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