Several full blown scandals have bombarded the Obama administration in the past few weeks alone, building on an already impressive list of past scandals. So much has happened recently that one might easily forget about Operation Fast & Furious, the dozens of spectacular green ‘investment’ failures like Solyndra, or even garden variety intimidation like Vice President Biden forcing a veteran ABC news reporter into a storage closet for more than an hour.
It’s basically a full-time job to keep track of all the corruption in this administration, and since we know you are far too busy to pick up a second job chronicling Obama’s lies & abuses, we will attempt to do it for you this week on GlennBeck.com.
DAY 1: Domestic spying, NSA
When President Obama told graduating students to dismiss the voices who warn of government tyranny, he did so knowing full well that just days earlier his administration had obtained a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data on millions of regular Americans. Not calls from terrorists, but all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States” must be handed over to the NSA, no matter what the content of the calls.
But that was just the beginning. Here’s a timeline with all the key dates and information you need to know (to date) on the NSA scandal:
- June 5, 2013: The Guardian runs story revealing the NSA is collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily.
- June 6, 2013: The Washington Post runs story revealing both the U.S. & the British are intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in a very broad & very secret program.
- June 9, 2013: Both The Guardian & the Washington Post name Edward Snowden as the NSA whistleblower.
- June 10, 2013: U.S. ‘disappointed’ to learn Hong Kong allowed Snowden to leave country, asks Russia to extradite him.
- June 11, 2013: Boehner sides with Obama, calls Snowden a traitor, leaks posed grave risk to America.
- June 14, 2013: U.S. charges Snowden with espionage and ‘theft of government property’.
- June 23, 2013: Obama humiliated as Russia snubs request; Snowden passport revoked.
- June 23, 2013: Surprise! Former Facebook security officer joins NSA.
- June 28, 2013: Feds previewed NSA leaks before Guardian printed story, but didn’t raise any security concerns about content of NSA leaks, seemingly contradicting Boehner & Obama’s security concerns.
- June 29, 2013: Report: NSA technology designed to ‘destroy privacy’ can store one billion cell phone calls every single day.
- June 29, 2013: Obama refers to Snowden as a ’29 year old hacker’ who he won’t scramble jets for.
- June 30, 2013: The new cold war? NSA bugged European Union offices.
- July 1, 2013: Obama admin argued metadata collection was harmless – but this politician showed what metadata is capable of producing and why government wants it so much.
- July 1, 2013: Seven stats to know about the NSA’s massive data center in Utah.
- July 2, 2013: Bolivian president’s plane rerouted due to suspicion that Snowden may be on board.
- July 2, 2013: James Clapper apologizes for lying to Congress about NSA domestic spying.
- July 5, 2013: Bolivian president threatens to close U.S. Embassy after Snowden plane incident.
- July 5, 2013: Venezuela & Nicaragua offer asylum to Snowden.
- July 8, 2013: Snowden interview: he totally predicted exactly how U.S. would respond to his whistleblowing.
- July 9, 2013: Russian official Tweets that Snowden has accepted Venezuela’s asylum offer, tweet disappears moments later.
- July 10, 2013: First PRISM, now ‘upstream’ – 2nd data top secret data collection method revealed.
- July 11, 2013: Top Secret docs show Microsoft helped NSA intercept user communications.
- July 12, 2013: Snowden calls U.S. actions ‘threatening behavior’.
- July 14, 2013: Snowden has docs containing an ‘instruction manual’ detailing inner workings of the NSA.
Be sure to check back all this week for comprehensive roundups of the IRS scandal, the DOJ targeting of journalists, and much more.
