If you thought government surveillance was bad already, it just got worse. A lot worse.
[T]he Obama administration on Thursday announced new rules that will let the NSA share vast amounts of private data gathered without warrant, court orders or congressional authorization with 16 other agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security.
The new rules allow employees doing intelligence work for those agencies to sift through raw data collected under a broad, Reagan-era executive order that gives the NSA virtually unlimited authority to intercept communications abroad. Previously, NSA analysts would filter out information they deemed irrelevant and mask the names of innocent Americans before passing it along.
[...] Executive Order 12333, often referred to as "twelve triple-three," has attracted less debate than congressional wiretapping laws, but serves as authorization for the NSA's most massive surveillance programs — far more than the NSA's other programs combined. Under 12333, the NSA taps phone and internet backbones throughout the world, records the phone calls of entire countries, vacuums up traffic from Google and Yahoo's data centers overseas, and more.
In 2014, The Intercept revealed that the NSA uses 12333 as a legal basis for an internal NSA search engine that spans more than 850 billion phone and internet records and contains the unfiltered private information of millions of Americans.
[...] But this massive database inevitably includes vast amount of American's communications — swept up when they speak to people abroad, when they go abroad themselves, or even if their domestic communications are simply routed abroad. That's why access was previously limited to data that had already been screened to remove unrelated information and information identifying U.S. persons. The new rules still ostensibly limit access to authorized foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes — not ordinary law enforcement purposes — and require screening before they are more widely shared. But privacy activists are skeptical.
(Score: 1) by ilsa on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:37PM
Ugh... I'm so low energy right now I may not make sense, but I didn't want to leave you hanging.
Okay, I had to re-research this cause it had been a while. The stats I found were actually world-wide, not just in the US. In the US it's "only" like, once a month. How that compares to the general populace, I don't know.
Re republicans. Some quick searching found this:
http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/23/the-party-of-no-new-details-on-the-gop-plot-to-obstruct-obama/ [time.com]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/biden-mcconnell-decided-to-withhold-all-cooperation-even-before-we-took-office/2012/08/10/64e9a138-e302-11e1-98e7-89d659f9c106_blog.html?utm_term=.c5f31491c470 [washingtonpost.com]
There are a metric crapton of stories from a wide variety of sources so I won't bother to list them all. But there are countless stories on this from a variety of angles, including interviews with the republican leadership. Unless you can find something concrete to refute this, I'm gonna have to stand by this one. Not that it matters anymore, anyway.
And you're right re: tolerance. The textbook definition is exactly as you describe. My only point is that that isn't good enough. It'd go into more detail but I feel like my brain is shutting down as I type. But the end result is that the situation is basically hopeless. You can legislate rules of behaviour but you can't legislate acceptance. Only education and empathy can do that, but there's a gross lack of both and it's getting worse by the day. So.... *shrug*