Obama once said “no President is above the law” when it comes to spying on American Citizens
By Black Blue Dogs
Back in 2006 when President Obama was still a senator, he strongly opposed the nomination of U.S. Air Force General, Michael Hayden as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The disdain occurred because President Obama didn’t agree with the wiretapping of American telephone calls by the National Security Agency.
President Obama said, in 2006, that he would vote against Hayden to send a clear message to the Bush administration that no-one is above the law, even the president, although he added that he had no doubt that Hayden would be confirmed. President Obama went on to say that he was voting against Hayden in an attempt to make him realize the great responsibility he would be carry in protecting the American way of life and democracy.
President Obama continued to state that the American people had fought for freedom against unwarranted Government control over their lives. He said that although the government needed to find a way to fight terrorism, it should not be at the expense of American citizens’ privacy and rights.
“We have to find a way to give the President the power he needs to protect us, while making sure that he does not abuse that power. It is possible to do that. We have done it before. We could do it again,” President Obama said.
However, recent articles in the Washington Post and The Guardian claim that the NSA has been spying on the searches, emails and file transfers of Americans using a program called PRISM, which apparently tapped directly into the servers used by Apple, Google, Microsoft and others. The spying has occurred under the regime of President Barack Obama, making him appear quite hypocritical relative to the man he appeared to be seven years ago.
The articles also state that the NSA has worked with Verizon to monitor the metadata of millions of phone calls made by the American public. Apparently, PRISM is the code name for a very real U.S. government program which went into effect in 2007 and, according to reports its purpose is to observe potentially valuable foreign communications that might threaten the security of the United States.
However, some believe that PRISM has gone beyond those bounds into the realm of invasion of U.S. citizens’ privacy.
According to the Guardian, a top secret Power Point document has been leaked that shows that PRISM has grown exponentially over the last few years and many tech companies are involved with the surveillance program.
The Guardian states that according to the report, Microsoft was the first company to cooperate with PRISM in 2007, closely followed by Yahoo in 2008. The report goes on to say that Google joined in cooperation in 2009. In 2012, the program was supported by AOL, Apple, Facebook, PalTalk, Skype and YouTube.
Google, Facebook, and Apple have denied giving the government program direct access to their servers.
A spokesperson for Google said that it only gives user information to the government in accordance with the law and that any allegations that Google has created a “back door” for the government to use in their systems, was completely false.
