All people should reject US, which is asserting as empire: Analyst
The Unhived Mind
All people should reject US, which is asserting as empire: Analyst
Thu Jul 3, 2014 9:28PM GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/07/03/369754/all-people-should-reject-us-empire/
A US presidential commission’s ruling that the NSA surveillance abroad is legal and realistic shows that the US is trying to assert itself as an empire, which should be rejected by all the people, an American political activist says.
A five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, appointed by US President Barack Obama, concluded on Tuesday that the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance programs designed to gather internet data within the US employ “reasonable” safeguards to protect the rights of American citizens.
However, the oversight board found that the NSA surveillance of foreign nationals is not only legal, but also realistic and found “no trace of any such illegitimate activity associated with the program, or any attempt to intentionally circumvent legal limits.”
“Mass surveillance whether it takes place here in the US or anywhere around the world is illegitimate invasion of privacy. It’s criminal activity, and it’s acknowledged as criminal activity in the United States,” Sara Flounders told Press TV in a phone interview on Thursday.
“So this oversight board to say it’s completely legal and legitimate to do outside the US what is still illegal to do inside the US shows once again a complete double standard,” she added.
“It also really shows and what we know about this is anything that is done abroad in fact does come home… There are no borders that are possible electronically anymore. So to say it’s legal to do it on international scale what’s not legal internally, that those borders no longer exist on the internet or in communication today, it’s [like] creating an artificial barrier, or pretending that there is a barrier, which does not in fact exist,” the peace activist stated.
Flounders went on to say that US activities, however, are “right in with this increasing use by the US not only of surveillance but of drone weapons and drone surveillance of any country that doesn’t have the capacity to stop the drones from their continuing overflight, the use of invasions and interventions and sanctions against countries around the world.”
“Surveillance, this kind of electronic surveillance is an infringement even on commerce, on exchange on political ideas, and it really all is illegal and illegitimate,” she emphasized.
“So this ruling is…really an effort to say that the US Empire can do anything it wants, and it should be rejected by the people of the US and the people of the whole world and denounced as one more attack on all the people of this planet,” Flounders concluded.