Counting the ways we are watched.

The POTUS defended his goverment by saying that "no one is listening to your telephone calls or reading your email" . There are a lot of   more important issues at stake. More important  than no one eavesdropping  on Americans. It is the world and its people who are being spied upon.  And they outnumber the 'protected  Americans many times over. Do their freedoms actually  mean nothing? Do they have a voice in challenging what the American rulers do to undo the freedoms of the vast majority of people  around the world?

10 Things Americans Underestimate About Our Massive Surveillance State

The latest revelations are just the tip of the iceberg.

Americans may be upset about the latest revelations in the government’s ability to spy on citizens via their online lives, but no one should be surprised. We've underestimated and overlooked many key aspects of the government’s ability to track our lives for years.

The bottom line, which resonates most strongly among civil liberties advocates on the left and conservative libertarians on the right, is not just the loss of privacy but also the growing power of the state to target and oppress people who it judges to be critics and enemies. That list doesn’t just include foreign terrorists of the al-Qaeda mold, or even the Chinese government that has stolen the most advanced U.S. weapon plans; it also includes domestic whistleblowers, protesters and journalists—all of whom have been targeted by the Obama administration Justice Department.

Let’s go through 10 points about these latest revelations of domestic spying to better understand what Americans have underestimated and overlooked about electronic eavesdropping.

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Even these latest scoops are not the whole picture. Other phone providers like Sprinthave told their customers they will share information with the government if asked. The NSA installed tracking devices on Google’s servers after the company realized it had been hacked by China four years ago in an effort to see what the FBI knew about China's spies in America. Americans have overlooked that as the Internet has grown, so has the NSA’s ability to track and trace everyone’s online lives.

4. Overlooked: How the NSA is getting away with this. If you really want to know how the NSA has been able to get away with this—and how the Obama administration has been able to say it has been doing nothing that has not been approved by Congress—you have to look at the reality that high-ranking lawyers inside the government have been exploiting legal loopholes to let NSA do what it wants.

This is no different than what election lawyers do when they want to get around campaign finance laws. Congress passes laws. The administration drafts regulations to carry out those laws. And lawyers—in and outside of government—find ways to get around what they don’t like in those laws. This article on the Balkinization legal blog explains exactly how that path unfolded from the Patriot Act, to the FBI, to the NSA. It includes the astounding legal construction that the data dumps are not data “collection” because they’re electronic, not on paper—until they are processed.

“So the NSA gets to obtain information in a more intrusive way than it might otherwise be allowed,” wrote Rachel Levinson-Waldman, counsel at the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School for the blog.

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9. Underestimated: The power that government is accumulating. People do not realize how powerful the government is until they become its target. The most chilling aspect of the interview NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake gave on Democracy Now! was how his life came undone once the federal government decided he was its enemy—because he believed the press and public needed to know that earlier NSA electronic surveillance violated the Constitution. The power of the state—whether local police videotaping protesters or the Justice Department going after journalists and whistleblowers—is staggering. The United States in 2013 is not Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but what is true about both countries in both eras is that the populace was far too compliant as the state accumulated power and selectively undermined civil liberties.

10. Overlooked: A smarter way to respect civil liberties and fight foreign enemies. Some of the press reports on the latest NSA election dragnet suggest that Americans face a choice between losing their privacy rights and protecting national security. That seems like a false choice. Where the White House, Congress and corporate America’s leadership has utterly failed is explaining what the real threats are and what needs to be done—including safeguarding the rights that Americans value. On Friday, President Obama said the media reports of the surveillance were “hype” and nobody was reading private e-mails, saying the government's efforts were limited, balancing privacy and security concerns. In short, he said "trust us."

Obama's comments were not reassuring, because they lacked details about what's going on. The NSA’s electronic dragnet was created after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Is al-Qaeda a big threat anymore? Or is the bigger threat how the Chinese government hacked into the security systems that supposedly protected US weapons systems and stole all the blueprints to the most advanced technology? Americans hear all about the continuing threat of al-Qaeda and very little about the much bigger Chinese intelligence coup.

What’s missing is a much smarter public discussion that respects Americans’ intelligence and rights, including elected public representatives telling permanent government agencies that "no means no." And, though it’s unlikely to happen, corporate America drawing a line on domestic spying for the government.     

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/surveillance-nsa?paging=off