Add this item to the list of benefits/disadvantages of U.S. citizenship?
According to the former officials, U.S. cyberspies, most from military units who’ve received specialized training, sit at consoles running sophisticated hacking software, which funnels information stolen from computers around the world into a “fusion center,” where intelligence analysts try to make sense of it all. The NSA is prohibited by law from spying on people or entities within the U.S., including noncitizens, or on U.S. citizens abroad. According to one of the former officials, the amount of data the unit harvests from overseas computer networks, or as it travels across the Internet, has grown to an astonishing 2 petabytes an hour—that’s nearly 2.1 million gigabytes, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pages of text.
Emphasis added.
Source: How the U.S. Government Hacks the World / Bloomberg BusinessWeek (May 27-June 22, 2013) 36
Full article at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-23/how-the-u-dot-s-dot-government-hacks-the-world
Oh, I’m sure that they hacked me and spent a bunch of taxpayer dollars in the process. But, for what?
You should be put on a CLN watch list, if Reed and Schumer have their way.
As Peter Spiro points out over at Opinio Juris, the idea that the NSA can tell from mass electronic surveillance whether a person is a US citizen or not is clearly ludicrous (unless they have x-rays that can see that “property of US government” tattoo & barcode):
Of course, maybe with the pressure of the current scandal, the NSA is suddenly going to shape up and fly straight and get Really Serious about obeying the law and not running surveillance on Americans abroad. Then State is going to have to come up with a mechanism to provide them with CLNs so they know when they can start surveillance. Maybe we’ll even see regulations in the Federal Register giving an exact definition of the date on which former United States citizen is deemed no longer to be a United States person for espionage purposes. And if it is “the day preceding”, that raises another important question: Eastern Standard Time as used in Washington DC, or the time local to the person who actually gave up US citizenship? So many fun questions for the bureaucrats to pretend to consider!
If you use the Internet, you’ve been spied on. Your citizenship is immaterial. If the NSA hasn’t scooped you up, your ISP or Google or Apple or any entity you’ve used has handed over massive amounts of information to the US that includes you.
There is no privacy. But the problem is that there is no long a need to prove probably cause in order to go fishing for information. There is just fishing and then using the information in a way that fits whatever scenario needs propping in the ever expanding narrative that the world is a crawling with evil doers who threaten our freedoms.
It’s a joke. And not a very funny one.
Another one from the 30 year tax hack
http://mopsicktaxlaw.blogspot.se/2013/06/the-irs-fatca-nsa-and-international.html?goback=.gde_4118437_member_249334527
@Finally, after all the talk, the world’s financial institutions are going to get a chance to call the U.S. Government’s bluff! This July, foreign financial institutions have the opportunity to be on the very first IRS published list of companies who are eager “to out” their American depositors, report their names to the IRS and become a full-fledged withholding agent for Uncle Sam. But what if nobody signs up?! What if a vast conspiracy of international foreign bankers agrees to humiliate the United States and ignore the IRS Portal to let them know what they really think about FATCA?
While we are on the topic of the Fantasy World of International Banking, I’ll bet the FATCA Unfriendly countries have already considered……
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_center
The Swiss economy commission of the federal council just voted against US blackmail 16 to 9
@Calgary411
Having 72 fusion centres could lead to a lot of confusion.
@SwissPinoy Great news.
Maybe the Swiss can now arrest some CIA agents for putting their population in danger of being hit by a drunk driver and who knows what else.
“Switzerland Questions U.S. Over CIA Drunk Driving Gambit”
http://news.yahoo.com/switzerland-questions-u-over-cia-drunk-driving-gambit-173556303–abc-news-topstories.html
I live, there for I am tracked. CLN or no CLN, it doesn’t matter. This is what the technological age has brought us. Along with my MapbyHike AP, I also have an NSA shadow follower. Maybe this was the guardian Angel my mother led me to believe in as I was growing up.
Noonan: Privacy Isn’t All We’re Losing
The surveillance state threatens Americans’ love of country.
The U.S. surveillance state as outlined and explained by Edward Snowden is not worth the price. Its size, scope and intrusiveness, its ability to target and monitor American citizens, its essential unaccountability—all these things are extreme.
The purpose of the surveillance is enhanced security, a necessary goal to say the least. The price is a now formal and agreed-upon acceptance of the end of the last vestiges of Americans’ sense of individual distance and privacy from the government. The price too is a knowledge, based on human experience and held by all but fools and children, that the gleanings of the surveillance state will eventually be used by the mischievous, the malicious and the ignorant in ways the creators of the system did not intend. For all we know that’s already happened. But of course we don’t know: It’s secret. Only the intelligence officials know, and they say everything’s A-OK.
Perhaps what we’re seeing with “whistleblowers” is just what journalism once was and should be: Greenwald: Crime of Doing Journalism
@Calagary411 https://twitter.com/FATCA_Fallout/status/345649562632998912
@ggreenwald ON NSA SNOOPING: POLS WANT ME ARRESTED FOR ‘CRIME OF DOING JOURNALISM’ http://bit.ly/163QdLd How about journalism on #FATCA ??
Just Me, thanks for making such good use of the “arrested for the crime of doing journalism” statement. Is Edward Snowden a Hero? A Debate with Journalist Chris Hedges & Law Scholar Geoffrey Stone is related.
@Calgary411
In Peter King’s world, two people can conspire to commit a crime if each make separate statements that can be combined together to create a crime, regardless of whether each statement has a direct connection with each other or not.
@calgary411
That one was a little harder to do. Democracy now would ideologically be in favor of FATCA (as a tax evasion stopping measure) unless you could really get Amy Goodwin to open her eyes to see the civil liberties and surveillance angle. Probably should work more on her and Glen Greenwald, as he is on her show a lot too.
Not many characters to work with on that one to pull FATCA into the debate angle.
So will try to put two together, so to speak…
https://twitter.com/FATCA_Fallout/status/345676419004760066
Thanks for pursuing these avenues, Just Me.
bubblebustin, it is unbelievable those who do not support free press, good journalism. If you have nothing to hide, you should not be concerned with how the NSA operates? Where have the real journalists gone (like those of yesteryear that really went after a story, who refused to be gagged)? What they’re missing with the collateral damage FATCA story and the jihad on US Persons Abroad is depressing and worrying. The US populace won’t know what they had until it is gone, another right never to return.