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"Senator Ron Wyden thought he knew what was going on. The Democrat from Oregon, who has served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence since 2001, thought he knew the nature of the National Security Agency's surveillance activities. As a committee member with a classified clearance, he received regular briefings to conduct oversight."

I'm a retired lawyer in Oregon and a devout civil libertarian. Wyden is one of my senators. I have been closely following this government digital surveillance stuff since the original articles in 1988 that first broke the story on the Five Eyes' Echelon surveillance system. E.g., http://goo.gl/mCxs6Y While I will grant that Wyden has bucked the system gently (he's far more a drag anchor than a propeller), he has shown no political courage on the NSA stuff whatsoever. In the linked article, he admits keeping his job as a Senator was more important to him than doing anything *effective* to stop the surveillance in its tracks. His "working from the inside" line notwithstanding, he allowed creation of a truly Orwellian state to develop without more than a few ineffective yelps that were never listened to because he lacked the courage to take a stand and bring down the house that NSA built with documentary evidence. It took a series of whistleblowers culminating in Edward Snowden's courageous willingness to spend the rest of his life in prison to bring the public to its currently educated state. Wyden on the other hand, didn't even have the courage to lay it all out in the public Congressional record when he could have done so at any time without risking more than his political career because of the Constitution's Speech and Debate Clause that absolutely protects Wyden from criminal prosecution had he done so. I don't buy arguments that fear of NSA blackmail can excuse politicians from doing their duty. That did not stop the Supreme Court from unanimously laying down an opinion, in Riley v. California, that brings to an end the line of case decisions based on Smith v. Maryland that is the underpinning of the NSA/DoJ position on access to phone metadata without a warrant. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9647156672357738355 Elected and appointed government officials owe a duty to the citizens of this land to protect and defend the Constitution that legallh

""For all the time I worked on all of these issues, this was a constant discussion," Olsen says. "How do we calibrate what we're trying to do for the country with how to protect civil liberties and privacy?""

NSA can't credibly claim surprise at how people reacted to the Snowden disclosures. NSA's spying on U.S. citizens was first uncovered by the Senate's Church Committee in about 1976. Congress enacted legslation unequivocally telling NSA and the Defense Department that spying on Americans was not to happen again (and that the CIA was to immediately cease spying within the territorial boundaries of the U.S.). Then came the Total Information Awareness scandal, when Congress discovered that DoD was right back at it again, this time operating from under the cover of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Congress responded by abolishing the program and eliminating the job position of its director, former Admiral John Poindexter of Iran/Contra scandal fame. But rather than complying with the abolition order, most of the TIA program's staff, hardware, software, and data was simply transferred to NSA. NSA, of course, persuaded the Justice Department to secretly reinterpret key provisions of the Patriot Act more broadly than a First Grade preschooler would allow to continue spying on U.S. citizens. Indeed, anyone whose college education included the assignment to read and discuss George Orwell's 1984 would have known that NSA's program had drastically outgrown the limits of what a free society would tolerate. So this is really about deliberate defiance of the limits established by the Constitution and Congressional enactments, not about anything even remotely legal or morally acceptable. The fact that Congress did not react strongly after the Snowden disclosures, as it had after the Church Committee's report and discovery of the TIA program raises a strong suspicion that members of Congress have been blackmailed into submission using information about them gathered via NSA surveillance. We know from whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Russell Tice that members of Congress were surveilled by NSA, yet not even that violation has been taken up by Congress. Instead

" According to a new company announcement, customers who sign up for both AT&T wireless service and AT&T U-Verse TV or DirecTV service can nab unlimited data for $100 per month, plus $40 per month for each additional device:"

" Ernesto on October 31, 2015 C: 34 Breaking The RIAA is asking a New York federal court to issue a default judgment against the 'reincarnation' of the defunct Grooveshark music service. The record labels are demanding more than $13 million in piracy damages plus another $4 million for willful counterfeiting. "