NSA Email Surveillance Pervasive and Ongoing

dkleinsc writes "The NY Times has a piece about work being done by Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) and others to curb NSA efforts to read email and Internet traffic. Here's an excerpt: 'Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency's ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former NSA analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.'"

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More From The Atlantic

[wiredog]

Here.

Four NSA domestic surveillance programs.

• Terrorist Surveillance Program, which involves the monitoring of telephone calls.
• "Stellar Wind," e-mail meta-data mining.
• a program that keeps tabs on all the information that flows through telecom hubs under the control of U.S. companies and within the U.S.
• Pinwale e-mail exploitation.

Re:Oh, quit whining

[mpapet]

The ability of a common person to influence governmental matters is, as it always has been, very limited.

This is a false statement that people who aren't actually interested in doing the work required to make changes in the organization of their Republic.

American history is full of examples of real changes made by determined groups.

Temperance. (Americans still have a bunch of crazy laws thanks to these folks.)
Suffrage. (A constitutional amendment too! )
Civil rights.
Abortion rights (This battle is still on. The ones that fought for them, and the ones dedicated to taking them away)

So, get off your ass and get to work. Oh wait, I forget where I'm posting this.

Email was never secure to begin with...

[Logical Zebra]

Remember, email is sent in cleartext, unless it's encrypted, which most of us don't actually do.