Is the US government spying on Americans?

     The rise of government surveillance is a troublesome legacy of the September 11 attacks. Today, video cameras are visible everywhere in public places, recording people’s every move. But what about spying that can’t be spotted?
     Ten years after 9/11, new questions are being raised about what the US government is secretly doing on the internet and through satellites, using the Patriot Act and other national security law as justification.  Two American senators with access to top-secret intelligence raised the alarm in May, suggesting that the invasion of law-abiding Americans’ privacy was being carried out clandestinely - and that people would be shocked if they knew the extent.

“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon,” Senator Ron Wyden said on May 26 during a Senate debate. “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”

     Exactly what activities US agencies are carrying out remains unclear. Senator Wyden and Senator Mark Udall - also on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - have been unable to elaborate on their accusations because of official secrecy law.
     However, observers surmise that ordinary people may be caught up in an electronic dragnet searching for terrorists. Civil liberties advocates suggest that intelligence and law-enforcement agencies may be reading and cataloguing people’s e-mails in databases, as well as tracking their mobile phone locations.  US Justice Department public affairs officer Dean Boyd dismissed the senators’ allegations. “It’s quite unfortunate that your facts are so incorrect,” Boyd told Al Jazeera English when asked about Wyden and Udall’s comments.
     Boyd highlighted one provision of the Patriot Act in his response, Section 215. “Contrary to various claims in recent months and years, Section 215 is not a secret law, nor has it been implemented under secret legal opinions by the Justice Department,” he said.
     But the American Civil Liberties Union hasn’t been satisfied with that answer. The group has launched an extensive campaign to find out exactly how portions of the Patriot Act have been interpreted, and whether e-mails were being swept up and mobile phones tracked without probable cause.
     Michael German is a 16-year FBI veteran of counterterrorism operations who quit the bureau and later joined the ACLU. He told Al Jazeera English: “It’s clear the government is broadly collecting information regarding innocent Americans. It appears officials no longer need individualised suspicion, and a person’s good conduct does not protect them from scrutiny.”

The evolution of national security law

     Congress overwhelmingly passed the original Patriot Act in October 2001 after the 9/11 attacks, arguing that its broad powers were necessary to protect the country from terrorism. Civil liberties advocates have long questioned whether some aspects of the law threatened people’s privacy.  As debate took place in May on a vote to extend the Patriot Act for another four years, Senators Wyden and Udall warned that the executive branch had come up with a secret legal theory about what personal information it could collect, which didn’t dovetail with a plain reading of the text.
     Wyden and Udall continued to press for transparency after the Patriot Act extension was passed in late May. They sent a letter to the Director of National Intelligence, James R Clapper, who oversees 16 spy agencies, including the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency. The senators asked whether legal safeguards were in place to protect the electronic communications of law-abiding Americans under another security law, the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA).

"It is a matter of public record that there have been incidents in which intelligence agencies have failed to comply with the FISA Amendments Act, and that certain types of compliance violations have continued to recur," Wyden and Udall wrote. "We believe it is particularly important to gain an understanding of how many Americans may have had their communications reviewed as a result of these violations."

Kathleen Turner, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the senators that it was not “reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed".

Wyden wasn’t happy with the answer. “I understand that it may be difficult to come up with an exact count … but I believe that Congress at least needs to obtain an estimate of this number, so that people can understand the actual impact of the FISA Amendments Act on the privacy of law-abiding Americans,” he said.  Turner assured that the privacy rights of ordinary Americans were being protected. “We believe that we have put in place a robust compliance and oversight regime,” she told the senators.

The article can be found here.

Posted on Friday, September 02, 2011 / 0 comments / Read More

FDA turning your vitamins and supplements into unapproved 'food additives'

(NaturalNews) Proposed guidelines put forth by the agency for "New Dietary Ingredients" (NDIs) propose treating vitamins, herbs, and dietary supplements assynthetic food preservatives, which means pulling many of them off the market, and subjecting the rest to extreme regulatory protocols that will drive up costs and severely limit availability.

The Dietary Supplement Health and Information Act of 1994 (DSHEA), as manyNaturalNewsreaders likely already know, was a major victory achieved for health freedom. It is also the foundation upon which the dietary supplement market as well as the health of millions of Americans has thrived.

Part of this legislation, however, outlines that the FDA must establish a final rule for how supplement manufacturers are to notify the agency of NDIs, a mandate that the FDA finally got around to addressing back in July. But what the FDA came up with as a solution is the complete opposite of what DSHEA, and the Congress that passed it, intended for the agency to do.

Instead of creating a simple method of notification as it was supposed to do, the FDA decided instead to manipulate and distort the NDI notification process by turning it into a type of regulatory approval process, similar to what drug companies are required to complete in order to get new drugs approved.

Under the proposed FDA guidelines, vitamin and dietary supplement manufacturers will have to submitapplications for approval, rather than notifications of use, for all new ingredients or ingredient blends they use that were not in widespread use prior to 1994 when DSHEA was passed.

Because of tricky language contained in the proposal, practicallyall supplementscurrently on the market will be subjected to these new guidelines, as the FDA considers things like changed dosages and altered ingredient formulations with new ingredients.

This means that manufacturers of high-dose vitamin D, for instance, will be required to submit new NDI applications if the doses they sell were not in widespread use prior to DSHEA's passage in 1994. And even if the FDA approves an individual company's application for a specific form and dose of vitamin D,each additional manufacturerof the same vitamin D form and dose would also have to submit individual NDI applications for their products as well.
Full article an be found here.

Posted on Thursday, September 01, 2011 / 0 comments / Read More