President Obama has said the outrage over the federal government’s decision to monitor citizens’ phone activity is all “hype.”
He might want to share his opinion with the U.S. Air Force, which is ordering members of the service not to look at news stories about the data-mining scandal, according to an unclassified NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) obtained by WND.
The notice applies to users of the Air Force NIPRNET (Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network), which is the only way that many troops stationed overseas and on bases in the U.S. are able to access the Internet.
The last line of the executive summary states: “Users are not to use AF NIPRNET systems to access the Verizon phone records collection and other related news stories because the action could constitute a Classified Message Incident.”
Cindy McGee, the mother of an airman stationed in the UAE, spoke with WND.
“The fact that our government is attempting to censor our service members from the truth of what is happening here at home is truly frightening and disheartening,” said McGee.
Her son received the same notice.
McGee continued: “I am outraged that our government is attempting to censor the information from our military that every citizen in this country is potentially being targeted by our government in a massive overreach of their constitutional powers by unconstitutional surveillance of all Americans and storage of that data.”
In June, the London Guardian broke the news of the top-secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all of its call data on an ongoing basis to the National Security Agency.
The Washington Post later reported that the NSA and FBI were gathering data from the servers of nine U.S. Internet companies.
Then reports came out that there are 50 companies from which the government is collecting data.
In a press conference, the president dismissed what he called “hype” over the surveillance programs.
But concern over the broad surveillance is causing legislators to look into what they can do to enable more oversight of the operations.
The latest news detailing how the government keeps track of the massive amount of data and its origins was posted by the Guardian for everyone in the world to read, except members of the Air Force.
See the memo:
[poll id=”615″]
