Feinstein: Gov Shutdown is Crippling NSA Surveillance Programs

The Truth Behind The News

Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
October 3, 2013

James Clapper, told the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) that the government shutdown was “degrading intelligence-gathering capabilities in ways that may not become fully clear for weeks or months. As each day goes by, the impact and the jeopardy to the safety and security of this country will increase.”

General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency (NSA) sat alongside Clapper before the SJC.

Alexander denied to the SJC that the NSA has been searching social networking sites for names of foreign terrorists in connection with US citizens.

Testing for the NSA cellphone tracking program was conducted from 2010 to 2011 with GPS locators.

Alexander said: “This may be something that is a future requirement for the country but it is not right now because when we identify a number, we give it to the FBI. When they get their probable cause, they can get the locational data.”

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) let go of everyone, safe for “essential” employees; such as analysts and operatives on counterterrorism missions who are assigned to monitoring terrorist organizations, tracking terrorist related threats and surveying watch lists of persons of interest.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the SJC spoke to the Senate about government furloughs that are “crippling” surveillance agencies within the Department of Defense (DoD) and diplomats in foreign nations.

Feinstein said: “Our shutdown is the biggest gift that we could possibly give our enemies. [With few exceptions], the lights are being turned off and the majority of the people who produce our intelligence, analyze intelligence and provide warning of terrorist attacks or advise policymakers of major national security events will be prevented from doing their jobs.”

Feinstein asserted: “I’ve listened to this program being described as a surveillance program. It is not. There is no content collected by the NSA. There are bits of data – location, telephone numbers – that can be queried when there is reasonable and articulable suspicion.”

In July, the House of Representatives voted to allow the NSA PRISM program to remain funded within the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2014 (NDAA).

Currently the NSA is empowered by the 2001 US Patriot Act , Sec. 215 (50 U.S.C. § 1861), that states the federal government can collect data on Americans if there is a claim of national security compromise.

Meanwhile, in Utah, the largest data collection computing facility is being slated for its grand opening this fall.
The Bluffdale Utah NSA Spy Center (BUNSC), a.ka. The Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center is measured at 1 million square feet and costs taxpayers an estimated $2 billion.

Russ Tice, former NSA intelligence analyst turned whistleblower has recently revealed that the BUNSC is currently operational amid claims by the NSA to the contrary.

Tice remarked that “the recent NSA scandal only scratches the surface of a massive surveillance apparatus.”

The BUNSC will be able to store either yotabytes or zetabytes of information (depending on which MSM outlet is quoted) which would necessitate 10,000 racks of servers, assuming that one rack is 10 square feet.

Under this estimation, the BUNSC could actually contain exabytes of information. This is an unprecedented amount of data. However, attention on this one facility has over-shadowed the fact that the NSA has other locations of storage space in Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii and Texas – including as well Australia and Britain.

An audit of once secret documents concerning the Obama administration’s abuse of surveillance agencies and invasion of American’s right to privacy is revealing that President Obama has lied to the American public.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has broken the law in order to obtain data on “suspects” since 2008.

In 2012, nearly 3,000 requests for information were illegally made and approved which led to more spying. And these victims were individuals with green cards.

Shockingly, the amount of grammatical errors in the documents is telling of the mind-set of those involved in the data-mining.

Obama swore that: “If you look at the reports … all the stories that have been written, what you’re not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s emails. What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now, part of the reason they’re not abused is because these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).”

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