Obama went on Leno a few days ago, and insisted that, “There Is No Spying On Americans:

President Obama defended the , telling NBC’s Jay Leno on Tuesday that: “There is no spying on Americans.”

“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama said on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. … That information is useful.”

Obama also called the National Security Agency’s surveillance a “critical component to counterterrorism,” and defended the shutdown of U.S. embassies and travel warnings this weekend, saying they followed information about a possible terrorist threat “significant enough that we’re taking every precaution.”

He’s lying, as James Ball and Spencer Ackerman showed in today’s Guardian, where it was revealed that the NSA is using a legal loophole to warrantlessly search Americans emails and text messages:

The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.

The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing “warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans”.

The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs.

The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection.

The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant, and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as “incidental collection” in surveillance parlance.

But this is the first evidence that the NSA has permission to search those databases for specific US individuals’ communications.

Only, as I noted a few days ago, the DEA is using NSA intercepts against people in the United States and lying about it.

You may be thinking that it is still not a problem, because you don’t do drugs, but you probably use money, and guess what, the IRS is using NSA intercepts too:

Following up on exclusive reporting from earlier this week about how the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency uses NSA surveillance data and tips from a secretive unit called the Special Operations Divisions (SOD) to initiate investigations, Reuters on Thursday reveals that the Internal Revenue Service was aware of and may have also used these “unconstitutional” tactics.

What’s troubling in both cases, according to legal experts, is the manner in which the agencies hide the true source of an investigation’s starting point—never revealing the use of the highly classified sources involved—and then “recreate” a parallel investigation to justify criminal findings.

Additionally troubling is that the IRS and the DEA are only two of the more than twenty federal agencies that work in tandem with the SOD, leading to speculation that the practice of utilizing than hiding surveillance techniques that have not been properly documented or approved could be far-reaching.

So, the f%$#ing IRS is f%$#ing collaborating with the f%$#ing NSA to invade your privacy, and find out if there is something, anything that they can use against them.

And by the way, the successes that they are touting as a result of our government going “Big Brother” on all of us?  The best that they have come up with is the trial and conviction of a cab driver who did nothing but send money to al-Shabab in Somalia:

He was a San Diego cab driver who fled Somalia as a teenager, winning asylum in the United States after he was wounded during fighting among warring tribes. Today, Basaaly Moalin, 36, is awaiting sentencing following his conviction on charges that he sent $8,500 to Somalia in support of the terrorist group al-Shabab.

Moalin’s prosecution, barely noticed when the case was in court, has suddenly come to the fore of a national debate about U.S. surveillance. Under pressure from Congress, senior intelligence officials have offered it as their primary example of the unique value of a National Security Agency program that collects tens of millions of phone records from Americans.

For getting this cabbie, we are spending $2-4 billion just on a data center in Utah.  (The NSA budget is estimated to be worth more than $ 10 billion)

Big brother don’t come cheap, apparently.

I don’t care about Obama’s most recent offer to create the illusion of transparency.

It is clear that the problem with surveillance dragnets that it will be abused by bad people, and bad people, whether he understands it or not is Barack Obama in his war on whistleblowers.