Oregon Senator Reveals Secret Government Surveillance Grid

[ktlight]

FYI:


In an interview with Wired, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, adds yet more confirmation to what many of us have known for years – the government has built a secret surveillance structure far more portentous and dangerous than anything devised by the PATRIOT Act now up for renewal.
Wyden points to the so-called “business-records provision” of the PATRIOT Act which empowers the FBI to force businesses, medical offices, banks and other organizations to turn over any “tangible things” it deems relevant to a so-called security investigation.
“It is fair to say that the business-records provision is a part of the Patriot Act that I am extremely interested in reforming,” Wyden told Wired. “I know a fair amount about how it’s interpreted, and I am going to keep pushing, as I have, to get more information about how the Patriot Act is being interpreted declassified. I think the public has a right to public debate about it.”
“Surveillance under the business-records provisions has recently spiked,” writes Spencer Ackerman. “The Justice Department’s official disclosure on its use of the Patriot Act, delivered to Congress in April, reported that the government asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for approval to collect business records 96 times in 2010 — up from just 21 requests the year before. The court didn’t reject a single request. But it ‘modified’ those requests 43 times, indicating to some Patriot-watchers that a broadening of the provision is underway.”
During the Bush years, it was revealed that the NSA had engaged in a massive dragnet of electronic communications without court order in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. In 2006, Bush waved off criticism of NSA snooping and said the program was “necessary to win this war and to protect the American people” against terrorism.
In 2006, the NSA argued that it is above the law and the Constitution and said a courtroom challenge to its surveillance program would expose sensitive state secrets and demanded it be thrown out.

source to continue
http://www.prisonplanet.com/oregon-senator-reveals-secret-government-surveillance-grid.html

[Heartsong]

From this morning's paper: http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2011105290334
(Senator Wyden represents my part of Oregon)

"Sen. Ron Wyden.
Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden knows something you don't. He knows how the Obama administration is employing the USA Patriot Act, which authorizes wide-ranging, covert surveillance on Americans and foreigners in the U.S.

He's not allowed to tell you what the Patriot Act really does, but he thinks you deserve to know. And he's right.

"When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry," Wyden said in a Senate speech last week before Congress reauthorized key provisions of the law.

Wyden is a longtime member of the Senate intelligence committee, making him one of the select few who have been briefed on the government's use of the Patriot Act. He's not allowed to say what he knows.

But he is not asking that the government reveal the individual details of its domestic surveillance. Rather, he contends that the full Congress, as well as the public, should know what types of domestic anti-terrorism surveillance the U.S. Department of Justice considers legal under the Patriot Act.

That information — that interpretation of the law — is classified.

Congress has to re-authorize portions of the Patriot Act every four years, including provisions regarding wiretaps, searches and surveillance. President Obama deemed the law's reapproval so important that he signed it remotely from France, via an autopen machine.

But how can Congress have a meaningful debate on a law when most representatives and senators, like their constituents, aren't allowed to know what the law officially means? Wyden wisely voted against reauthorizing the law.

The law's official interpretation will come to light sometime. By then it may be too late. Past decades have revealed various government-authorized covert operations that turned out to be questionable — and often blatantly unconstitutional.

Remember how the CIA illegally opened the mail and listened in on thousands of Americans during the Vietnam war? Remember how the federal government for 30 years monitored telegrams coming in and out of the U.S., sometimes as many 150,000 a month?

Telegrams are long gone. But concerns about unconstitutional violations of civil liberties remain. Remember how the government skirted the law after 9/11, conducting wiretaps without court authorization, which led to passage of the Patriot Act?

Americans have a responsibility to follow the law. So does government, including law enforcement and intelligence agencies — even when conducting secret operations and even when the subject is as serious as our nation's security.

If agencies are secretly revising the law's intent to suit their own purposes, they ultimately will face a deep backlash from the public and a loss of effectiveness.

Keep the anti-terrorism surveillance operations secret — as long as they're legal. But the law itself should be public."

[Maia Gabrial]

I'm already angry about the Patriot Act. It's dangerous. Our constitutional rights are neutralized....Just wish more Americans cared....But that won't happen until it affects them personally; then they'll understand how dangerous it really is.
Maia

[Charlie Pecos]

And why is it classified?
To protect us?- NO
To protect national security?- NO
Well then, could it be to protect the idiots who have passed this legislation against the best interest of their country and it's people? BINGO! If the greater US population were to find out and understand what these corporate shills have done against us for the money in their pockets, they would be hanged in the streets by sunset-and they know it. Their lives aren't be worth the paper that BS is written on.

[johnf]

I myself live in Oregon, and I wonder why actions such as those taken by Ron Wyden and
Defazio are the only ones I know of that are moving in the direction of actual freedom and real law.
If there are others i would like to hear of them

[Lord Sidious]

Anyone that REALLY believes that you can vote on something that you are not allowed to read and that this vote is legitimate should never be allowed to run a bath, let alone any form of control apparatus.