From Gary Bauer at Campaign for Working Families regarding the latest revelations 
about the Obamanations omnipressence.
Emails & Internet Data Too
Yesterday it was phone records. Today we are learning that the Obama Administration is also routinely accessing vast amounts of online data from the world’s leading tech firms through a top secret program called PRISM.
Today’s Washington Post reports: “The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs.” The companies involved are: AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PalTalk, Skype, Yahoo and YouTube.
The Obama Administration insists the program is intended to track only foreign terrorists or spies, adding that there are “extensive procedures” in place to “minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons.” But doesn’t that suggest that the “acquisition, retention and dissemination” of information about U.S. citizens is in fact taking place?
The intelligence officer who provided the top secret data to the Washington Post commented, “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.” Fact or alarmism? Who knows?
Context Matters
The Wall Street Journal stands by the program today in an editorial entitled “Thank You For Data-Mining.” It makes the point that if it weren’t for the IRS scandal, folks probably wouldn’t be so upset. To my friends at the Journal, that’s the whole point! Context matters!
If it weren’t for the administration’s attack on our First Amendment and Second Amendment rights, its use of the IRS to intimidate and silence its critics, its reliance on class warfare and use of secret email addresses, and if it weren’t for its actual day-to-day weakness in confronting radical Islam, we might be willing to trust it more on a whole host of things.
But why would anyone trust this gang with massive amounts of data about who we call, what emails we send, what books we read and what Internet sites we visit?
I take second place to no one on taking a tough, aggressive stand against radical Islam. But at this point, the average American’s liberties are much more likely to be restricted by this president and his left-wing allies than any combination of imams, mullahs and Islamic extremists.
And given all we know, who wants to bet that before this administration ends we will find out that this data was misused too? This administration routinely hurls more vitriol and anger at its conservative critics than it expresses against jihadists.
A plethora of government agencies have identified conservatives, constitutionalists, Christians and homeschoolers as potential terrorists. I don’t trust them to do the right thing on any issue, and I certainly don’t trust them not to abuse our privacy rights.
Gary Bauer
