Yishan Wong Quotes

The first non-PRI President in over 70 years.

The call for embedding the balance in the law is in contrast to the past where the balance was left to the discretion of the intelligence agency leadership but technological limitations curtailed their ability to unbalance things too much.

Critics of NSA observe that there is a fundamental difference between government invasion of privacy and that of corporations in that the Government can deprive a citizen of his/her liberty or even life while corporations can just invade their privacy, embarrass them, or hurt their economic status. Counter-critics rejoinder is that 99 percent of all the specific abuses of privacy and damages to citizens in the U. S. from massive data collection are made by private corporations, not the NSA or other government agencies.

He was referring to the power of the United States in cyber to hack into the computers, e-mail and phones of foreign leaders. Many other americans wouod argue that a more imoiortant reason to consuct this kind of surveiulance was to obtain warnings about dangers to America and/or Americans abroad. Still ohters wold agree with Atone but unlike Sone who feels that this is morally and politically wrong, they think that there is noting wrong with us using our power to promote the Amercian agenda. There has always been a part of America that was evengelical for the free democracy with civil rights protected even from government that America uniquely developed. And then there are some American wold be imperialists. This is an issue on which Americans have desagreed since our founding.

The FBI had obtained a court order requiring apple to write software that could hack into a person's iPhone. Apple, with most other hi-tech companies in support, filed a motion with the court opposing the order. The FBI shortly thereafter withdrew its request for the order saying that they had found other solutions, when they had originally told the court that there were no other solutions. The issue however was and remains a very difficult political, moral, ethical, and legal conundrum.

He was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The NSA had hacked into the servers of these firms and others that were located out of the country. (They would need to have a warrant if inside the country.) The companies had never known it until Edward Snowden made this practice public. The result was, the public was learning that there was no privacy in any of their e-mail, social media activity, exchange of photos or videos or anything else. The companies feared that this would then harm their business, and that the techniques NSA used to hack there servers would then be discovered and used by others to steal identities, credit cards and do such other damage to customers. Even if the particular hacking methods were not leaked to the bad guys, they, knowing that the servers were vulnerable, would be encouraged to work to figure it out.

He was trying to assuage the anger and anxiety when it became public that the NSA had been monitoring all the calls of American citizens and not only suspected terrorists. He made the distinction between metadata and content. He claimed NSA was gathering the phone numbers of the parties on the call, the time and duration, but not listening in to the contents. Critics asked how he could be sure and that if the agency were gathering all the data, they could easily listen to any. Later the agency admitted that it had “inadvertently” examined the content of some communications.

While it is true that almost all nations have intelligence agencies and collect intelligence about both friends and foes, our allies did not bug the personal phones of leaders of friendly countries and were very distressed when they discovered that the US NSA had access to the personal calls of world leaders including the leaders of Brazil, Germany and France. Rubio and others believed that they only reason our allies had not done so is that they did not have the technical capability to do so; otherwise they would have been bugging our Presidential and cabinet level phones. President Obama ordered the practice stopped with respect to our allies.