Big Government Is Watching You Through PRISM and Phone Records

Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: If it weren't for the administration's attack on our First Amendment and Second Amendment rights, its use of the IRS to intimidate and silence its critics, its reliance on class warfare and use of secret email addresses, and if it weren't for its actual day-to-day weakness in confronting radical Islam, we might be willing to trust it more on a whole host of things. But why would anyone trust this gang with massive amounts of data about who we call, what emails we send, what books we read and what Internet sites we visit?

Emails and Internet Data Too
Yesterday it was phone records. Today we are learning that the Obama Administration is also routinely accessing vast amounts of online data from the world's leading tech firms through a top secret program called PRISM.

Today's Washington Post reports: "The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs." The companies involved are:  AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PalTalk, Skype, Yahoo and YouTube.

The Obama Administration insists the program is intended to track only foreign terrorists or spies, adding that there are "extensive procedures" in place to "minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons." But doesn't that suggest that the "acquisition, retention and dissemination" of information about U.S. citizens is in fact taking place?

The intelligence officer who provided the top secret data to the Washington Post commented, "They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type." Fact or alarmism? Who knows?

Big Brother Barack
Yesterday, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic broke a story by the left-wing British paper the Guardian that the Obama Administration is not only seizing the phone records of journalists, but of millions of other Americans too.

The Guardian reports that Obama's National Security Agency obtained a secret court order demanding Verizon turn over all of its phone records on an "ongoing, daily basis." Phone calls were not being listened to, but the information collected would allow the government to know "the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication."

One left-wing civil rights group called the order, "the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued: it requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon subscribers anywhere in the U.S."

As the story developed throughout the day, leading senators on the Intelligence Committee said the program has been in place for seven years and that Congress has been routinely briefed. Other senators disputed that. Sen. Lindsey Graham defended the program. However, some senators have said that Americans would be "stunned" if they knew the full extent of the surveillance of U.S. citizens.

In war, it is often necessary to do things that you would not do in peacetime. But such things are done ultimately to preserve all of our liberties. If Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush were in office, I and other Americans might be more comfortable with this program, knowing we could trust them not to abuse the information.

But with this regime -- given all we know about its attempts to intimidate the news media and to use the IRS to silence its critics -- I have no tolerance for this sort of massive data seizure.

Think about this: Obama's politically correct military missed all the signals about the radicalization of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Even after he murdered 14 people, top officers fretted about "diversity." We were told that the government missed the Tsarnaev brothers because the anti-terror database was "too big" and "vague."

Yet, the same government is seizing all our phone records, and the IRS is zeroing in on a mother in Alabama for merely wanting to promote the values of our country's founding. Something is very wrong. Add this latest development to the growing list of items requiring congressional review and oversight.
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Gary Bauer is is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families where his articles are also shared.

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