From last month: Engadget reports on USG/UKG tapping Google and Yahoo & spying on a ton of users. Serious #BigBrother stuff.

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From the Engadget post:

It's a top secret plan with a fittingly supervillain-esque codename: MUSCULAR. That tool, part of a partnership between the NSA and the UK's GCHQ, has been used to infiltrate Google and Yahoo data centers across the world, according to documents revealed by Edward Snowden and confirmed by sources at The Washington Post. It's a breach of privacy that could affect hundreds of millions of users, one that neither company was apparently privy to, in spite of the NSA's history of court-ordered data access with both.

The original post: http://goo.gl/oQmfLX

So, while our planet is being stripped of its resources, our government is stripping us of much of our privacy and, as a result, our freedom of speech. I feel like they know something we don't. Like maybe the world is only going to get worse and they need to clamp down on us to keep us in line, so they can stay in power. When governments feel threatened, this is what they do.

NYTimes reports on FISA Court giving the NSA even more power to amass private data related to non-terror cases. Did the USG start a new war and not tell us?

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From the article:

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

I mean, seriously, did the USG start a war and not tell us? What is all this data for? Last time I checked, the vast majority of us are not invovled in nuclear proliferation or cyberterrorism. I also don't remember the Fourth Amendment being suspended. Soooo... WTF, USG? Why so serious?