Opt out of PRISM, the NSAs global data surveillance program. Stop reporting your online activities to the American government with these free alternatives to proprietary software.

Website set up with a column graph that shows you which online web browsing, social networking, e-mail services and everything else in between, internet programs that do and DO NOT cooperate with NSA’s PRISM data surveillance dragnet.

Good Luck…

suns-of-liberty:

stopprism:

“I have nothing to hide!” is irrelevant.

• Privacy isn’t about having nothing to hide! Surveillance grants the government a great deal of power to make decisions about you, and because the surveillance is secret, you get no say in the decisions. (Please read the article, or the original paper; I cannot summarize it in a single bullet point.)
• We should all have something to hide. The civil rights movement, interracial marriage, and gay marriage would never have been allowed if nobody had anything to hide. Free speech is essential to the exchange of ideas in democracy, but so is the ability to try new and socially-unacceptable things.
• You do have something to hide. The United States Code is so vast and complicated that you probably commit several felonies a day. (Please don’t use the inevitable argument “If you have nothing to hide, take off your clothes” or similar arguments. The government isn’t proposing to watch you in the shower. Yet.)
• If the government erroneously believes you do have nothing to hide, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. The evidence is secret and likely will never be presented to you.
• If the government chooses to use its surveillance against you, it can pick and choose which parts to present in court. Because the rest is classified, you do not have the right to use it to try to exonerate yourself.
• Even if the government does not attempt to attack you using surveillance data, any prosecution (or illegal abuses; see below) it takes against other people will make you reluctant to use your First Amendment rights to free speech. “Better not say anything, or I might end up like that guy.”

Oversight-free surveillance isn’t necessary for national security.

• The problem isn’t surveillance — it’s surveillance without adequate oversight and targeting. National security could be preserved by a program which also respects our civil rights. The Fourth Amendment does not ban surveillance. It bans surveillance without judicial oversight and clear limits. An order to collect all phone records clearly violates this.
• Terrorism isn’t as vast a threat as it’s made out to be. You’re just as likely to be killed by a deer as by Al-Qaeda. Food poisoning, drunk driving and obesity kill more people each year, but we’re willing to cede our liberty to fight terrorism and not to fight Big Gulps?
• Any large data-mining program is statistically bound to be overwhelmed by false positives which consume government time and resources and mean most people marked as “probably a terrorist” and put under more extensive surveillance will likely be innocent.
• Is there really evidence that this surveillance preserves our national security? So far, there is some doubt that the administration’s examples of foiled terrorist plots were actually foiled by the NSA’s surveillance. (Wyden and Udall agree.)
• The NSA could save more lives by using pervasive surveillance to mail tickets to people who text and drive.

Metadata invades your privacy.

Metadata is probably more invasive than most searches that require a warrant. You could not obtain most of this information by strip-searching me:

• From your choice of friends, I can determine your sexual orientation.
• Your cell phone records reveal your place of work, the popular events you have attended (including political events and protests), your mode of transportation, and presumably your favorite restaurants and spots for romantic flings.
• Your cell phone location records are unique, and four data points can be used to uniquely identify you. Switching cell phones will not save you — the new phone will show the same pattern of movement, and can be linked to you.
• Your credit card purchase history (which is also collected by the NSA) can be mined to reveal all sorts of details about you, such as whether you are pregnant.

Targeting people based on metadata, such as who they call and spend time with, is targeting based off of their First Amendment right to freely assemble and associate.

Revealing surveillance programs doesn’t harm national security.

• Oh no, now the terrorists won’t use phones or the Internet! Perhaps we can’t intercept messages sent by carrier pigeon, but by forcing them to switch to less efficient means of communication, we have already disrupted their plans.
• No terrorist will realize “the government is on to us!” after reading that the government is watching everyone. It’s equivalent to thinking the government is watching no one.
• The continued secrecy of programs which violate our rights harms our security — security from the abuses of our government. Consider the case of Joseph Nacchio.

The government has a history of abusing surveillance.

• HTLINGUAL was a CIA project to illegally read mail sent to the Soviet Union and China from 1952-1973.
• COINTELPRO was the FBI’s effort to put political advocacy groups, like the NAACP, Martin Luther King, various women’s rights groups, and anti-Vietnam War groups, under surveillance so they could be disrupted or stopped. Hoover ordered the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the groups. The FBI attempted to blackmail and discredit MLK. Several people were killed by the FBI and police agencies.
• See also Operation CHAOS.
• Legal and judicial oversight did not stop the NSA’s earlier warrantless wiretapping program, which continued under executive order until exposed.

Yes good.

andthentherewasplur:

George Takei is hardly the only American concerned about the NSA’s massive surveillance programs. But unlike most people, his fears are rooted in the memory of the government persecution he suffered firsthand in a Japanese internment camp. 

“Due process is a pillar of our American justice system,” the Star Trek star told Daily Intelligencer last night at the Eighth Annual Stella by Starlight Benefit Gala. “We were rounded up simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. And we were put in prison camps with barbed wire and machine guns pointed at us. It was a horrific violation of our Constitution.”

Because of that experience, Takei is particularly wary of the government’s powers being abused. “We know where this can go,” he said. “We have to be ever vigilant against overstepping of the fundamental ideals of our democracy.”

Takei understands that President Obama “is a person who has to deal with a lot of issues.” But on the NSA spying programs, he says, “I don’t agree.”

The US National Security Agency’s recently revealed internet surveillance program PRISM has been broadly condemned by tech companies, even those whose networks were allegedly involved. But now some organizations and companies are going further, sending a letter to Congress today calling upon lawmakers to immediately halt PRISM and other forms of internet surveillance. Mozilla, Reddit, 4chan, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are among the 86 different organizations that have co-signed the letter, and they have also launched a new campaign online, “StopWatching.us,” which invites web users to add their signatures to the petition as well.

Apparently there is a Twitter Account that hosts a plethora pro-NSA spying tweets, emphasizing that the government has every right to look through and archive all of your personal data especially if you have nothing to hide. It seems to be an attempt to drum up artificial or otherwise support for broadening American Surveillance authorities over communications. 

REBLOG NOW!

With a filing due next week in an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Justice Department today asked a federal judge for time to reconsider its position on whether it will continue seeking to withhold documents related to its secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That provision, which allows the government to acquire “any tangible thing” relevant to a foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigation, was the basis for the secret FISA Court order revealed this week by The Guardian telling Verizon to turn over troves of phone call data.

Until now, the government has taken the position that what it thinks it’s allowed to do under Section 215 should stay hidden from the public. This is unacceptable, because it’s impossible to debate the wisdom of a law if the public doesn’t know how the government interprets it. But today, following last night’s release of classified aspects of the NSA’s surveillance practices by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the government asked the court for 30 days to consider whether to change its position in our FOIA case. Here’s an excerpt from the DOJ letter to the court:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his company are suddenly facing a big new round of scrutiny and criticism about their cavalier attitude toward user privacy.

An early instant messenger exchange Mark had with a college friend won’t help put these concerns to rest. 

According to SAI sources, the following exchange is between a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and a friend shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask. 

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

The National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US Internet companies, The Washington Post has reported.

According to the Post, this has allowed investigators to examine e-mails, photos and other documents of tens of millions of Americans that can be used to track people and their contacts over time.

The highly classified anti-terrorism programme, code-named PRISM, had not been disclosed publicly before. A US government source who was not authorised to comment publicly on the programme confirmed its existence to the Reuters news agency late on Thursday.

The programme’s participants, the Post said, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

The outrage over President Barack Obama’s authorization of a nearly limitless federal dive into Americans’ phone records obscures a hiding-in-plain-sight truth about the 44th president many of his supporters have overlooked for years:

For all his campaign-trail talk of running the “most transparent administration” in U.S history, Obama never promised to reverse the 43rd president’s policies on domestic anti-terrorism surveillance — and he’s been good on his word.

Obama’s effort to strike what he’s repeatedly called “a balance” between personal liberty and homeland security has exposed what amounts to a split political personality: Candidate Obama often spoke about personal freedom with the passion of a constitutional lawyer — while Commander-in-Chief Obama has embraced and expanded Bush-era surveillance efforts like the 2011 extension of the Patriot Act, which paved the way for a secret court order allowing the gathering of Verizon phone records.

In an irony now being savored by his conservative critics, Obama administration officials are now relying on Republicans to defend him against charges from liberals and the libertarian right that he’s recklessly prioritized national security over personal liberty.

Justice Department agreed to issue ‘2511 letters’ immunizing AT&T and other companies participating in a cybersecurity program from criminal prosecution under the Wiretap Act, according to new documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Read this article by Declan McCullagh on CNET News.

Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by AT&T and other Internet service providers, a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping laws.

The secret legal authorization from the Justice Department originally applied to a cybersecurity pilot project in which the military monitored defense contractors’ Internet links. Since then, however, the program has been expanded by President Obama to cover all critical infrastructure sectors including energy, healthcare, and finance starting June 12.

“The Justice Department is helping private companies evade federal wiretap laws,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which obtained over 1,000 pages of internal government documents and provided them to CNET this week. “Alarm bells should be going off.”

Those documents show the National Security Agency and the Defense Department were deeply involved in pressing for the secret legal authorization, with NSA director Keith Alexander participating in some of the discussions personally. Despite initial reservations, including from industry participants, Justice Department attorneys eventually signed off on the project.