NSA Scandal: Hey Congress, Big Brother ‘Touched My Junk’!

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." ~Fourth Amendment to The United States Constitution So, it's finally out there for all to see … the dirty little secret that Big Brother is spying on law-abiding citizens of the United States. And those who were considered "crazy", "conspiratorialist" and "paranoid" were anything but. The Guardian UK has verified the legitimacy of an NSA document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation, classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies, which was ostensibly used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers. The NSA program called PRISM, granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more, involved several tech giants. And allowed "direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple". The senior officials of these tech giants all denied ever knowing about PRISM. But I believe that's semantics. They may indeed have not heard of this program, but that's not a denial of allowing the NSA to gather our info from them. OK, let's get this straight … the National Security Agency … a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S. government communications and information systems … was spying on MILLIONS of law-abiding US citizens. AND, it was done without a search warrant and without probable cause. So, Big Brother “Touched My Junk” !! Taking a moment to relax in order to deter a head explosion... No worries … we have the Congress … our duly elected representatives, to look into this and find out why this department of our government VIOLATED the Fourth Amendment and spied on its own citizens. They were using the Patriot Act ... meant to prevent Terror Attacks … as justification for their actions. My question is: Why? Why do they need massive amounts of personal data on millions of law-abiding US citizens? What exactly do they plan to do with this information? The GOP-led House has been doing a stellar job, so far, of demanding answers from the IRS and DOJ (though the perps have been woefully uncooperative in sharing). But it remains to be seen what they will do punitively, on behalf of the American people. It's now necessary for this Body to get answers as to why the NSA has committed, and continues to commit, this egregious violation of our precious Fourth Amendment. The 2014 election will be here before we know it … so get crackin'!! Perhaps we'll finally get what we paid for, with those Congressional salaries...

Audrey Russo

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