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Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data | World news | guardian.co.uk
Many representatives have complained that they were not informed of this surveillance program.
"Boundless Informant" is a great name for a program that's supposed to be "very narrowly circumscribed."
In my opinion this is very frightening because of the way in which the President has already abused his power. I know that this intelligence gathering isn't supposed to be used against ordinary Americans, but the IRS wasn't supposed to target the President's political opponents, wasn't supposed to leak their confidential information, the DoJ wasn't supposed to bug and target reporters or accuse them of crimes for doing their jobs. But it has all happened. What is there to keep the Administration from corrupting the NSA's activities as well?
On Friday, in his first public response to the Guardian's disclosures this week on NSA surveillance, Barack Obama said that that congressional oversight was the American peoples' best guarantee that they were not being spied on.
"These are the folks you all vote for as your representatives in Congress and they are being fully briefed on these programs," he said. Obama also insisted that any surveillance was "very narrowly circumscribed".
Senators have expressed their frustration at the NSA's refusal to supply statistics. In a letter to NSA director General Keith Alexander in October last year, senator Wyden and his Democratic colleague on the Senate intelligence committee, Mark Udall, noted that "the intelligence community has stated repeatedly that it is not possible to provide even a rough estimate of how many American communications have been collected under the Fisa Amendments Act, and has even declined to estimate the scale of this collection."
Many representatives have complained that they were not informed of this surveillance program.
"Boundless Informant" is a great name for a program that's supposed to be "very narrowly circumscribed."
In my opinion this is very frightening because of the way in which the President has already abused his power. I know that this intelligence gathering isn't supposed to be used against ordinary Americans, but the IRS wasn't supposed to target the President's political opponents, wasn't supposed to leak their confidential information, the DoJ wasn't supposed to bug and target reporters or accuse them of crimes for doing their jobs. But it has all happened. What is there to keep the Administration from corrupting the NSA's activities as well?