On Friday, President Barack Obama defended secret programs to monitor Americans’ phone calls, emails, and other internet activities, labeling them “modest encroachments” on privacy. “In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother, and how this is a potential program run amok,” Obama said. “But when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance.”
After a UK Guardian report about the administration working with Verizon to seize millions of phone records per day, the Washington Post reported that the NSA and FBI are “tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.” The Post reported, “the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.”
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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