by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.....makes it a federal crime for any company participating in the surveillance to publicly acknowledge the existence of that surveillance. Thus, executives at Facebook, Google, Skype and others would all face arrest and federal prosecution as "terrorists" if they admitted the truth to their own users.
That's just how far down the rabbit hole this government surveillance program goes: Not only does the government spy on you and everything you do -- "they quite literally can watch your ideas as you type" -- the government can also force all the tech companies cooperating with the spying to publicly deny the existence of the program.
But the New York Times -- yes, the NYT which hardly ever engages is actual journalism -- has gone public with an article confirming that these tech companies did, indeed, concede to the NSA surveillance program. "They opened discussions with national security officials about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests. And in some cases, they changed their computer systems to do so," says the NYT in an article titled Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program.
Except it wasn't just "foreign users," it turns out. The program quickly ballooned to encompass users in the United States, too. The NYT goes on to report:
In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said.
This is how companies like Google and Facebook can claim, with a straight face, that the NSA doesn't have "backdoor access to our servers." They don't need it! What actually happens is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others simply deposit all user data at another location -- a "gateway" where the NSA copies it off.
Now you understand how to correctly parse this fake denial by Google's chief executive Larry Page, who says, "The U.S. government does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centers."
It doesn't need "direct access." It has INDIRECT access that was set up by Google!
Here's the slide from the top secret PRISM program that tells the truth. (Click here for the original source page at the Washington Post)
How the government flipped the script on "foreign terrorists" to "domestic threats"
All this is, of course, an outrageous abuse of the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Because when both of those were being debated on the Senate floor following the false flag attacks of 9/11, it was promised that "this would never be used against Americans." Hence the name "Foreign" Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was only about "foreigners," because they were the terrorists, right?
But over the last decade, the U.S. government flipped the script. All of a sudden the Obama administration was targeting "domestic threats" which it identified as veterans, patriots, conservatives, gun owners and anyone who believed in the Constitution. It didn't take long for the surveillance grid to be redirected toward the American people. Now, instead of FISA being used to track Bin Laden through a network of caves in Afghanistan, it was being used to track Bob Jones, a Kentucky farmer who owns a shotgun and carries a Bible.
This demonstrates just how easily these unconstitutional powers can be abused. History has shown that when the government is granted such powers, they will always turn them against the People sooner or later. Hence the reason for the Fourth Amendment and the entire Bill of Rights -- something that both Bush and Obama seem to think doesn't exist.