Obama to fine Internet firms $25,000 if they do not spy on you

Caesar Obama to support Internet wiretapping program

• Constitution?  What Constitution?  All hail the Police State.
• Both parties enthusiastically join together to fund and grow the Big Brother Surveillance State.

Caesar Barack Obama is likely to endorse a Federal Bureau of Investigation effort that would ensure all Internet companies in the US provide a way for the government to conduct undetected, backdoor surveillance of Americans without a search warrant.

On Tuesday, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage cited Obama administration officials as saying the President “is on the verge of backing” a fine-based spy model under which Internet companies would be forced to comply or risk being penalized beyond repair.

Savage explained that while companies would be allowed to operate without giving the government backdoor access, the fees would likely limit the number of entities willing to challenge the order.

As reported in RT News, a company that doesn’t comply with the FBI’s orders would be fined $25,000 after 90 days. Additional penalties would then be tacked on every day an Internet service provider, website or other company fails to comply — with the price of the penalty doubling each day they don’t assist investigators.


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At a press conference in Washington, DC in March, FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann said the Department of Justice was determined to have the means to wiretap any online communication by 2014 and called it “a huge priority for the FBI.”

On Wednesday morning, CNET reporter Declan McCullagh wrote that the Justice Department circulated memos in which they insisted that obtaining a search warrant isn’t necessary to eavesdrop on Internet communication of any sort.

“The US Department of Justice and the FBI believe they don't need a search warrant to review Americans' e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages and other private files, internal documents reveal,” wrote McCullagh, citing a government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to CNET.

According to McCullagh, those documents include very specific instructions from high-importance officials that demonstrate the Justice Department’s disinterest in applying established law when it comes to eavesdropping on Americans. While Weissmann made the argument that the FBI plan reportedly backed by the president won’t change what rules the DoJ operates by, the memos obtained by McCullagh paints the Obama White House as an administration unwilling to work with the already broad surveillance powers provided to it.

In one memo unearthed by the ACLU, McCullagh said the US attorney for Manhattan instructed his office that an easy-to-obtain legal paper that requires no judicial oversight is all that’s needed to obtain personal correspondence.

“[A] subpoena -- a piece of paper signed by a prosecutor, not a judge -- is sufficient to obtain nearly ‘all records from an ISP,’” McCullagh wrote.

In another instance, McCullagh said the US attorney in Houston, Texas obtained the "contents of stored communications" from another ISP without getting a judge to sign a warrant.


(RT News USA)