The government is monitoring private phone calls
your children and my children's private phone calls and tracking who their associates are
This June we learned that out private lives are no longer private
The US government is secretly tracking the emails
purchases, text messages, location and phone calls of people all over the world.
Ed Rooney, Ed? This is George Peterson...
With code names like PRISM and XKEYSCORE,
this network of monitoring programs
is just one part of largest survailance system in history.
This open-ended surveillance system is illegal and operates in total secrecy.
Under the system, the government can know where you have been,
where you are, and where you're going.
The program was only exposed when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden
leaked documents detailing the extensive data collection.
I've got information man, new shit is come to light.
The president, the NSA and their lawyers have tried to deflect the public outrage
by distorting the facts and misleading the public about the process
US courts have never allowed the government to run a spying program of this scale.
So how this happen?
Well, lets take a step back, for a minute.
America's founders hated oppressive British surveillance and unreasonable search and seizure.
the issue here is independence.
Understanding that privacy was necessary to almost every basic right in our constitution,
they established the forth amendment.
The fourth amendment exist to prevent the government from tracking or searching your personal information,
unless they have good reason to believe a crime is happening.
It's all there black and white, clear and crystal.
Using the NSA the US government is violating the highest law of the country, the Constitution.
Government surveillance has gone on for decades, but things got a lot worse in 2001,
when the US congress passed the Patriot Act,
giving secret FISA courts more authority to grant surveillance requests on a large scale.
Instead of getting a warrant for an individual person suspected of crime
the governement could now search a large list of persons.
Even those under the no suspicion of criminal activity.
FISA courts aren't required to disclose what court orders are being approved
and supporting evidence isn't needed.
Of the 1789 request for authorization, one was withdrawn by the government.
All the other ones were granted
It's a rubber stamp
All of this is protected by secrecy, with no system for checks and balances.
If the NSA is collecting information on you based on what you read, or the websites you go to
you'll likely never know or get to stop it no matter who you are.
Programs like PRISM, completely ignore the purpose of warrants
while claiming to work within the law.
The US government has turned the internet we love into something it was never intended to be...
...a tool for surveilling everyone.
This is the most essential problem.
Through these secret courts and secret interpretations of the laws,
US government agents can illegally track internet user based on things like keywords,
Analysts who use a system for a web portal at Fort Mead,
key in selectors or search terms that are designed to produce at least 51% confidence
in a targets foreign-ness.
Data has been collected for years on the most popular websites,
gmail, facebook, yahoo, and many more
There's 1000s of words that government tracks.
Words like "marijuana"
Almost any email you send
might get your account monitored.
This kind of tracking can make you second guess what you say.
That's why mass spying is unconstitutional.
Abuses are inevitable and data leaks are already happening.
Spying on our internet usage gives the government power over our lives.
What happens to free speech, free association, or a free press,
when everyone is under constant surveillance, even in our most private moments.
Experts on surveillance, privacy and intelligence, agree on one thing.
The NSA, Presidents Bush and Obama and their secret courts are
interpreting multiple laws in a way that most Americans would find shocking.
This is allowing the kind of surveillance and collection
that the Constitution was not meant to allow.
These programs break the law.
They violate the fourth amendment and they strip us of our privacy.
The US Constitution was written to prevent government surveillance programs like PRISM.
It's up to us to us to demand that these ideals be upheld.
Help us stop the NSA, restore the Constitution and keep the world free.