NSA allowed to continue wanrrantless internet spying

The US has quietly renewed a law that retroactively authorises what the NSA has been doing for years – spying on the email and internet usage of people across the globe.

Everything that you do on the internet is now recorded and stored indefinitely. Thoughtcrime may not land you in hot water yet, but as the global police state grows, what you tweet, update or blog could be used against you in the future.

Don’t worry they say, if you’re not doing anything wrong, there’s nothing to worry about. Yeah right. Here’s something to worry about – the US army is also creating hordes of fake online identities to wage propaganda war on social media.

Four amendments to the laws were also defeated. Patrick Martin writes:

“One of the amendments would have required the NSA to obtain a warrant to monitor the Internet communications of an American citizen. Another would have shortened the reauthorization period from five years to three. A third would have made public the procedural opinions of the secret FISA court, established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which outline the scope of the communications monitored by the NSA.

“The fourth amendment would have required the NSA to reveal the extent to which it is monitoring the communications of American citizens.”

America’s intelligence apparatus has been building massive data centres to store the vast volume of data it captures.

“The Washington Post estimated in a 2010 report that the NSA stores 1.7 billion communications—e-mail, telephone calls and other messages—every single day. An NSA whistleblower has charged that the agency’s database has accumulated more than 20 trillion interchanges between Americans.”

But why? Martin explains:

“The driving force of this repressive activity is not fear of terrorism, but fear of the intractable social contradictions within the United States and the emergence of mass popular opposition to the austerity measures being introduced to devastate social services and the living standards of working people. In the final analysis, the buildup of police-state powers testifies to a truth long upheld by socialists: the growth of social inequality within capitalism, the ever-widening gulf between the financial aristocracy at the top and the rest of the population, undermines any basis for democracy.”

Read the entire article here: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/29/pers-d29.html