Each day that passes Americans are finding out how every aspect of their lives is being spied upon by the Obama administration and the National Security Agency (NSA). The Obama administration secretly obtained permission from the surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the NSA’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails. This decision permits the 
agency to deliberately search all communications by Americans in its massive databases, according to recently declassified materials. Additionally, the surveillance court extended the length of time the NSA is permitted to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five to six years. Under special circumstances, the NSA can retain these intercepted communications for longer periods.
Frank Jordans wrote an article entitled “Report: Smartphone Data can be Accessed” which was published in The Miami Herald on September 9, 2013. The reporter explained that the National Security Agency is able to bypass protective measures on iPhones, BlackBerry, and Android devices. In this manner, the agency has access to data on all major smartphones, according to an article published on September 8, 2013 in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel. The German magazine gathered this information from documents taken from NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ. These two spy agencies described setting up teams for each type of phone as part of the efforts to collect intelligence on potential threats.
Jordans pointed out that the data gathered in this manner includes contacts, call lists, SMS traffic, notes, and location information, according to the German magazine. One of the authors of the article in Der Spiegel is Laura Poitras, an American filmmaker, who has close contacts with the NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Poitras has written several articles about the NSA for the German publication in recent weeks. Snowden’s revelations have initiated a heated debate in Germany as to the advantage of that country in cooperating with the United States in intelligence matters.
The Der Spiegel article also included several slides from a NSA presentation referencing the film 1984, which is based on George Orwell’s novel that deal with a totalitarian surveillance state. The slides showed Steve Jobs, the former Apple chairman, holding an iPhone, and iPhone buyers celebrating their purchase and below a caption reads as follows: “Who knew in 1984… That this would be big brother… And the zombies would be paying customers?”
This is really an outrage! Whoever prepared the NSA´s slides was bragging to other employees in the spy agency about the fact that Americans are now living in a police surveillance state and make references to George Orwell’s novel and movie 1984. The NSA is calling Americans “zombies”? Congress needs to initiate an expanded investigation on the outrageous spying of all law-abiding citizens by the NSA. Hopefully, the lawmakers are not yet Obama’s “zombies”. It is one thing to spy on potential terrorists, but it is quite another to spy on the entire population of the country.
President Barack Obama is secretly asking and receiving from the surveillance court permission for expanded powers for the NSA. This president is taking our nation quite rapidly to a totalitarian socialist society and one in which he wants to surrender our sovereignty and our wealth to the United Nations to establish a world government.
This is not America anymore. This is not the beloved America that we grew up in. This is not the America that became a beacon of freedom to the entire world. This is not the America that saved the world during World War I and World War II. This is not the America that became the “shining city on the hill” and the place that the American people are so proud to live in.
This is an America that has become a police surveillance state. This is an America whose technology, instead of being used for the good of our society and the world, is being used to spy and oppress the entire nation.
