Sunday, March 18, 2012

Say good-bye to privacy thanks to Stellar Wind



March 18, 2011
By Hugh de Payns
American Thinker.com

The American republic, or any society so desiring emancipation to have its citizens live free and unfettered lives, must allow liberated and confidential communication.

Liberty and human dignity demand nothing less.

All of this is about to change.

With the construction of a new National Security Agency eavesdropping, data collection, and analysis facility in Utah, a program called Stellar Wind is now fully underway. This program now means, very simply, that secure and private communication now seems rather irrelevant. Liz Klimas of The Blaze:


NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: "Everybody's a target; everybody with communication is a target.: ... Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email.

Apparently everything is now subject to scrutiny and analysis and everyone now is a potential security threat. This is especially alarming because citizens who should raise no interest for law enforcement and national security agencies, will now be subject to warrantless and unjustified scrutiny and investigation.

Anonymity, and the safety it can bring to both author and reader alike, seems to have been destroyed.

Readers of American Thinker, each of us, can now properly ask ourselves a question: is our continued deliberation regarding the health of our nation and any other political discourse now putting our ourselves and loved ones at risk? Will simply reading American Thinker, the Weekly Standard, National Review, or for that matter, Mother Jones be regarded as subversive and threatening to the powers that control our government?

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