This is more about legalizing what is going on already:
With the pubic distracted by the FBI battling Apple for an iPhone backdoor, President Obama is secretly working to trash President Ronald Reagan’s restrictions on the number of federal agencies that can spy on Americans and others.
At a secret meeting of the United States National Security Council on Feb 25, President Obama approved a draft 21-page memo relaxing a Cold War Reagan-era directive called Executive Order 12333 that restricted the number of government agencies that can access, without court order or Presidential approval, the contents of phone calls, emails and data the U.S. National Security Agency vacuums up from around the world…
Sources indicate that the Obama administration initiative is being described as giving a number of U.S. government agencies direct access to the broad spectrum of electronic intercepts in the “hope that that they will recognize any possible nuggets of value.”
But the change will also mean that more officials will be looking at the raw data in private messages. Not only would that include foreigners’ phone calls and emails, but also communications to, from, or about Americans that the NSA’s foreign intelligence programs swept in “incidentally.”
It is a safe bet they already had some way to do this quasi-legally, be it through private sector companies doing it off the books using intelligence techniques and holding the data outside government, or routing the data overseas somehow and grabbing it there. Now they are just legitimizing it since they know nobody is paying attention.
Until the collapse, privacy will gradually disappear. There is just too much money, and not enough bad guys to keep the government occupied.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]