NSA mass phone surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden ruled illegal

  • Collection of millions of Americans’ phone records is ruled unlawful
  • Landmark decision by appeals court clears way for full challenge against NSA

The US court of appeals has ruled that the bulk collection of telephone metadata is unlawful, in a landmark decision that clears the way for a full legal challenge against the National Security Agency.

A panel of three federal judges for the second circuit overturned an earlier ruling that the controversial surveillance practice first revealed to the US public by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 could not be subject to judicial review.

But the judges also waded into the charged and ongoing debate over the reauthorization of a key Patriot Act provision currently before US legislators. That provision, which the appeals court ruled the NSA program surpassed, will expire on 1 June amid gridlock in Washington on what to do about it.

The judges opted not to end the domestic bulk collection while Congress decides its fate, calling judicial inaction “a lesser intrusion” on privacy than at the time the case was initially argued.

“In light of the asserted national security interests at stake, we deem it prudent to pause to allow an opportunity for debate in Congress that may (or may not) profoundly alter the legal landscape,” the judges ruled.

But they also sent a tacit warning to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate who is pushing to re-authorize the provision, known as Section 215, without modification: “There will be time then to address appellants’ constitutional issues.”

Read more @ http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/07/nsa-phone-records-program-illegal-court

 

Victory For Liberty!

APPEALS COURT STRIKES DOWN GOVERNMENT’S SPY STATE

|| By FITSNEWS || A week after a U.S. congressman told supporters of the American spy state to “just follow the damn Constitution,” one of the highest courts in the land has ordered them to do just that.

In a resounding victory for individual liberty, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals – based in New York City – has determined the government’s Orwellian domestic surveillance program “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized.”

Read more @ http://www.fitsnews.com/2015/05/07/victory-for-liberty/ 

 

Court rules NSA program illegal

Washington (CNN)A federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that the telephone metadata collection program, under which the National Security Agency gathers up millions of phone records on an ongoing daily basis, is illegal under the Patriot Act.

The government has argued it has the power to carry forward with the program under a section of the Patriot Act, which expires in June. Lawmakers are locked in a debate on whether or how to renew the authority, which was first passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington, but has been renewed by both Presidents Bush and Obama in the intervening years.

Documents confirming the program's existence were first revealed in June of 2013 with the leaks by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

Judicial rebuke

The decision by a three-judge panel that the phone record collection program, which was mostly secret for nearly a decade, is not supported by the current version of the law, will certainly enter into the brewing political debate over renewing it.

RELATED: Why the NSA decision matters

Judge Gerard E. Lynch, writing for a three judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, said the program "exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized."

Lynch wrote that the text of the Patriot Act "cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program."

Read more @ http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/07/politics/nsa-telephone-metadata-illegal-court/

 

Reining in the surveillance state

Read more @ http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-nsa-spying-20150505-story.html 

 

Edward Snowden fans see vindication in court ruling

New York court’s ruling says that the NSA surveillance Snowden exposed was “illegal.”

Edward Snowden hasn’t had his day in court, but he’s already finding some vindication in the U.S. judicial system.

A U.S. appeals court’s ruling on Thursday that bulk collection of telephone metadata by the National Security Agency is illegal has given fresh hope to supporters of the former government contractor, who say the judgment proves he was right to reveal the program. Some argue it’s another reason the 31-year-old should be allowed to return to the United States without fear of prosecution.

Stephen Kohn, executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center, said the ruling not only justifies Snowden’s actions, but underscores “the importance of whistleblowing.”

“Maybe someone who reveals a secret program that multiple federal judges say is ILLEGAL is a whistleblower who deserves gratitude — not prison?” tweeted Glenn Greenwald, the journalist whom Snowden turned to to help him reveal the bulk collection program.

Still, it’s unlikely Snowden, who has been living in Russia for nearly two years, will decide to buy a plane ticket home anytime soon. The judicial process isn’t over, and the material he handed over to news organizations concerned many government intelligence-gathering programs, not just metadata collection dealt with in Thursday’s ruling.

Read more @ http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/edward-snowden-nsa-court-ruling-telephone-records-117733.html

Snowden scores a big victory

Read more @ http://www.businessinsider.com.au/snowden-scores-a-big-victory-2015-5

 

Noah Feldman: Court vindicates Snowden, says no to secret laws

In a major vindication for Edward Snowden — and a blow for the national security policy pursued by Republicans and Democrats alike — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Thursday that the National Security Agency's metadata collection program is unlawful.

This is the most serious blow to date for the legacy of the USA Patriot Act and the surveillance overreach that followed 9/11.

The central question depended on the meaning of the word "relevant": Was the government's collection relevant to an investigation when it collects all the metadata for any phone call made to or from anywhere in the U.S.?

The court said no. That was the right decision — not so much because it protects privacy, as because it broke the bad precedent of secret law created by the NSA and endorsed by the secret national security court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The first striking thing about the court's opinion was how openly it relied on Snowden's revelations of classified material. The court described how the program was known — by Snowden's leaks. It also analyzed the NSA order to Verizon, leaked by Snowden, that proved the existence of the program and revealed indirectly the legal reasoning that the government relied on to authorize the metadata collection.

The Second Circuit seemed supremely untroubled by the origin of the information in a violation of classification laws. At one point, it noted that the government disputed the claim that virtually all metadata are being collected — then dismissed the government's suggestion as unconvincing in the light of the evidence. Today, it would seem, the Snowden revelations are treated as judicially knowable facts, at least in this court.

Then there's the legal reasoning, which was equally striking. To get to the conclusion of unlawfulness, the Second Circuit initially had to find that anyone who has had metadata collected — that is, anyone in the U.S. — has the right to sue and challenge the statute.

Read more @ http://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-edward-snowden-nsa-spying-feldman-0508-20150507-story.html

 

Of Snowden and the NSA, only one has acted unlawfully – and it’s not Snowden

With the NSA’s bulk surveillance ruled illegal, the debate on the Patriot Act should be reinvigorated – with Edward Snowden free to join in

On 6 June 2013, the Guardian published a secret US court order against the phone company Verizon, ordering it on an “ongoing, daily basis” to hand over the call records of its millions of US customers to the NSA – just one of numerous orders enabling the government’s highly secret domestic mass surveillance program. Just days later the world learned the identity of the whistleblower who made the order public: Edward Snowden.

Now, almost two years later, a US court has vindicated Snowden’s decision, ruling that the bulk surveillance program went beyond what the law underpinning it allowed: the US government used section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify the program. A US court of appeals has ruled the law does not allow for a program so broad. In short, one of the NSA’s most famous and controversial surveillance programs has no legal basis.

Of Snowden and the NSA, only one has so far been found to have acted unlawfully – and it’s not Snowden. That surely must change the nature of the debate on civil liberties being had in America, and it should do so in a number of ways.

Read more @ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/07/edward-snowden-whistleblower-nsa-bulk-surveillance-illegal 

 

Yes, the NSA did act illegally

It has been hard to avoid talk of the NSA over the past year or so -- Edward Snowden's revelations blew the lid off convert surveillance that has been carried out by the US government. It has been a hugely divisive issue, many heralding Snowden as a hero, others as a traitor and has led people to question whether everyday software might include secret backdoors.

Included in the NSA's activities was the mass collection of metadata about phone calls made and receive by American citizens. Today the US court of appeals ruled that this data collection is illegal. With other countries adopting NSA-style surveillance tactics, the ruling opens up the possibility that the NSA could face further legal proceedings and probes.

Read more @ http://betanews.com/2015/05/07/yes-the-nsa-did-act-illegally/

 

Did all the surveillance stop the Texas attack…… Nope!  That is the thing with all the spying…. The spies have had 2 years to bring in laws in other countries to protect the spying…. So if one country loses the ability (to collect due to laws) there are other countries collecting for them….  My dear old mother always use to say, “never put all your eggs in one basket”… and I believe that is exactly what the spies and their backers thought of too. 

 

The Snowden Blindfold Act

Congress moves to weaken antiterror surveillance while France expands it.

At least one of the gunmen who shot up a Texas free speech event on Sunday was known to the FBI as a potentially violent radical and was convicted in 2011 on a terror-related charge. The Islamic State claimed credit for this domestic attack, albeit an unproven connection. So it is strange that Congress is moving to weaken U.S. surveillance defenses against the likes of shooters Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi.

Two years after the leaks from Edward Snowden’s stolen dossier, a liberal-conservative coalition is close to passing a bill that would curtail the programs the National Security Agency has employed in some form for two decades. Adding to this political strangeness, France of all places is on the verge of modernizing and expanding its own surveillance capabilities for the era of burner cell phones, encrypted emails and mass online jihadist propaganda.

Read more @ http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-snowden-blindfold-act-1430953633 

 

This damning quote from judges reveals the unprecedented scope of NSA spying

A US appeals court has ruled the Patriot Act never authorised the National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ phone records, and its opinion reveals just how unprecedented in scope that collection was.

The laws that the US government used to defend its vast surveillance program “have never been interpreted to authorise anything approaching the breadth of the sweeping surveillance at issue here,” the opinion from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stated.

Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle in 2013 on the agency’s surveillance program, which collected so-called metadata from phone calls. (Metadata includes phone numbers, duration of calls, and times of calls.)

While metadata collection doesn’t monitor the content of what people say, the appeals court described the volume of the information the government was seeking as “staggering” and not authorised by Section 215 of the Patriot Act as the government argued it was.

The NSA’s metadata collection was much broader in scope than other methods the government uses to collect information like search warrants and subpoenas, the appeals court said. From the opinion:

Read more @ http://www.businessinsider.com.au/second-circuit-reveals-scope-of-nsa-metadata-collection-2015-5 

 

The Computers are Listening

How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text

Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.

But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.

Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.

The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.

Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.

The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.

Spying on international telephone calls has always been a staple of NSA surveillance, but the requirement that an actual person do the listening meant it was effectively limited to a tiny percentage of the total traffic. By leveraging advances in automated speech recognition, the NSA has entered the era of bulk listening.

And this has happened with no apparent public oversight, hearings or legislative action. Congress hasn’t shown signs of even knowing that it’s going on.

The USA Freedom Act — the surveillance reform bill that Congress is currently debating — doesn’t address the topic at all. The bill would end an NSA program that does not collect voice content: the government’s bulk collection of domestic calling data, showing who called who and for how long.

Even if becomes law, the bill would leave in place a multitude of mechanisms exposed by Snowden that scoop up vast amounts of innocent people’s text and voice communications in the U.S. and across the globe.

Civil liberty experts contacted by The Intercept said the NSA’s speech-to-text capabilities are a disturbing example of the privacy invasions that are becoming possible as our analog world transitions to a digital one.

Read more @ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/

 

Its too much power for them to give up…..   Just imagine if you had the power to spy on everyone in the world…. Your enemies; your friends;  your exes; what people are saying in private conversation behind your back; on companies that can give you the inside knowledge on where to put your money; your exes; and everyone else; power to know what to say to skirt political talk ….. it gives so much power both financially and politically that anyone having it would suddenly feel very insecure and powerless if they lost it….. so would fight tooth and nail to keep it.  They don’t want to lose that edge they have over everyone…. Fine for them because they are benefitting from it, but not for the people who are spied on…..  it’s a sickening “one up man ship” that divides the people….. It creates “them and us”….. when in fact there is no “them and us”….. it’s all us.  We cannot step off the planet…. We are all here together.

White House Evaluating New Court Ruling Declaring NSA Data-Collection Program Illegal

Administration will continue to work with Congress to reform surveillance laws, NSC spokesman says.

The White House is evaluating a decision handed down Thursday by an U.S. appeals court holding the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk phone metadata collection program illegal.

"Without commenting on the ruling today, the President has been clear that he believes we should end the … bulk telephony metadata program as it currently exists," Edward Price, assistant press secretary and director of strategic communications at the National Security Council (NSC) said in an emailed statement to Dark Reading.

The goal is to create alternative mechanisms to preserve the program's essential capabilities without the government holding the bulk data, he said. "We continue to work closely with members of Congress from both parties to do just that, and we have been encouraged by good progress on bipartisan, bicameral legislation that would implement these important reforms," Price said.

Read more @ http://www.darkreading.com/cloud/white-house-evaluating-new-court-ruling-declaring-nsa-data-collection-program-illegal/d/d-id/1320332

Court Rejects Spying Program But McConnell Backs It

Read more @ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/05/07/court_rejects_spying_program_but_mcconnell_backs_it__126518.html

 

Republicans and the Patriot Act

The presidential candidates are taking sides. So far the Republican campaign for president has been fairly restrained, with the ever-growing field aiming most of their attacks at Hillary Clinton and President Obama. But the upcoming vote in Congress on reauthorizing the Patriot Act could open the first real fissures in the GOP field.

Read more  @ http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417939/republicans-and-patriot-act-michael-tanner

 

Republicans May Offer Short-Term Extension of Patriot Act

Read more @ http://www.govexec.com/oversight/2015/05/republicans-may-offer-short-term-extension-patriot-act/112027/

 

Right, left unite to blast McConnell over Patriot Act move

Read more @ http://thehill.com/policy/technology/241160-right-left-unite-to-blast-mcconnell-over-patriot-act-move

 

The First Real GOP Debate Of 2016 Is About The Patriot Act

Read more @ http://www.buzzfeed.com/katenocera/the-first-real-gop-debate-of-2016-is-about-the-patriot-act#.tkNZEYbZz

 

A New Standoff Has Emerged as the Future of Patriot Act Is in Flux

Read more @ https://news.vice.com/article/a-new-standoff-has-emerged-as-the-future-of-patriot-act-is-in-flux

 

McConnell Refuses to Budge on Patriot Act After Court Ruling Imperils NSA Spying

Read more @ http://www.govexec.com/management/2015/05/mcconnell-refuses-budge-patriot-act-after-court-ruling-imperils-nsa-spying/112195/

 

White House urges passage of Lee’s anti-spying bill after NSA ruling

Read more @ http://www.sltrib.com/news/2488321-155/white-house-urges-passage-of-lees

 

Forget unconstitutional, America’s mass surveillance program is just plain illegal

A US federal appeals court—essentially, the second-highest in the land—has ruled that the bulk collection of US telephone records by the National Security Agency isn’t permitted by laws passed after the 9/11 attacks to increase intelligence collection. You can read the entire decision here (pdf).

The challenge was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, along with the heads of the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense. (Of the five officials named in the suit when it was filed in January 2014, only Clapper remains in the same role.)

Read more @ http://qz.com/400165/forget-unconstitutional-americas-mass-surveillance-program-is-just-plain-illegal/

Germany restricts spy cooperation with NSA: reports

BERLIN: Germany’s secret service has severely restricted cooperation with its U.S. partner the NSA in response to a scandal over their alleged joint spying on European officials and companies, media reported Thursday.

The foreign intelligence agency BND this week stopped sharing Internet surveillance data with the U.S. National Security Agency, passing on only fax and phone intercepts, the reports said.

Berlin now demands that the NSA provide a justification for each online surveillance request, reported the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily, public broadcasters NDR and WDR, and national news agency DPA.

The NSA had been unable to meet the new request at short notice, the reports said. However, such a rule had long been in place for fax and phone surveillance conducted by the BND for the NSA.

“This is definitely a dramatic step,” said Greens party lawmaker Konstantin von Notz, who serves on a parliamentary panel investigating the NSA’s surveillance activities.

“I think they’ve pulled the emergency brake because, even in 2015, they still can’t control the search terms for Internet traffic,” he said, charging that the government was unable “to protect German and European interests.”

Read more @ https://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/World/2015/May-08/297195-germany-restricts-spy-cooperation-with-nsa-reports.ashx 

 

Germany restricts spy cooperation with NSA: reports

BERLIN: Germany’s secret service has severely restricted cooperation with its U.S. partner the NSA in response to a scandal over their alleged joint spying on European officials and companies, media reported Thursday.

The foreign intelligence agency BND this week stopped sharing Internet surveillance data with the U.S. National Security Agency, passing on only fax and phone intercepts, the reports said.

Berlin now demands that the NSA provide a justification for each online surveillance request, reported the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily, public broadcasters NDR and WDR, and national news agency DPA.

The NSA had been unable to meet the new request at short notice, the reports said. However, such a rule had long been in place for fax and phone surveillance conducted by the BND for the NSA.

“This is definitely a dramatic step,” said Greens party lawmaker Konstantin von Notz, who serves on a parliamentary panel investigating the NSA’s surveillance activities.

Read more @ https://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/World/2015/May-08/297195-germany-restricts-spy-cooperation-with-nsa-reports.ashx

 

Report: BND-NSA collaboration deeper than thought

The German news magazine Der Spiegel first outlined the extent of the BND's partnership with the NSA last week. But details are continuing to emerge, suggesting that more than metadata was shared.

Read more @ http://www.dw.de/report-bnd-nsa-collaboration-deeper-than-thought/a-18425290

 

Whistleblower Edward Snowden to speak at Victorian forum

Whistleblower Edward Snowden will appear by video link at a major conference in Melbourne on Friday.

Snowden will join a host of identities, who will gather at Melbourne Town Hall for the three-day forum Progress 2015, which will focus on big ideas for Australia's future.

The former NSA contractor and The Guardian's Person of the Year 2013 will speak at 5pm about the federal government's controversial mandatory data retention laws.

Read more  @ http://www.9news.com.au/national/2015/05/08/03/36/snowden-to-speak-at-vic-forum

 

Snowden death hoax rocks Twitter

NEW DELHI: A hoax tweet claiming that US whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had been found dead had Twitter in a tizzy on Wednesday.

The tweet came from the handle @RussiaIntMinist, bearing the name of the Russian minister for internal affairs Vladimir Kolokoltsev.

"Former NSA contractor Edward J Snowden was found died (sic) few minutes ago in his home. No details," read the tweet, while another one even announced a press conference featuring Snowden's lawyer Anatoly Kucherena later in the day.

About an hour and a half later the same account tweeted: "This account is hoax created by Italian journalist Tommasso Debenedetti."

Later in the day, the official verified account of the Russian ministry of internal affairs @mvd_official confirmed that both the story and the account were fake.

Debenedetti has been in the news before for creating fake accounts of individuals such as the Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu, German foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier, and former Italian PM Mario Monti.

The Italian "journalist" is also known for his hoax interviews conducted for several news papers. This wasn't the first time he impersonated Kolokoltsev.

Read more @ http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social/Snowden-death-hoax-rocks-Twitter/articleshow/47184319.cms 


New database taps LinkedIn to watch the NSA watchers

Everyday people are transforming the way police officers behave thanks to the power of camera-enabled smartphones. Now, the advocacy group Transparency Toolkit wants to transform the way the national security state behaves using other common tech tools: Google and LinkedIn.

The spooks who store our calling metadata and online activity in a vast warehouse in Utah may seem, well, spooky. But at the end of the day those carrying out state-sponsored surveillance are just people, and people need jobs. We tend to think of intelligence professionals as lifetime government employees, but there are many people who are employed by private defense contractors. Edward Snowden, for example, worked for Booz Allen Hamilton when he obtained all the files he eventually shared with journalists.

All about the resume

“When you need a job, you need to post about what you can do, and in the intelligence community the necessary skills are things like intercepting communications, using secret surveillance databases, and analytics tools,” M.C. Grath, Transparency Toolkit founder, said during the re:publica conference in Berlin on Wednesday.

Believe it or not, LinkedIn is filled with people advertising their surveillance skills including proficiency with National Security Agency programs like XKeyScore or Dishfire.

This online resume building allowed Transparency Toolkit to search public LinkedIn profiles for keywords relating to NSA activity and then build a public database with all this information. Called ICWatch, the database features more than 27,000 resumes of people working in the intelligence community. (At this writing, however, ICWatch was offline.)

Deciding on keywords must have been relatively easy since so many surveillance programs have surfaced via leaks from Edward Snowden and others. However, the searches also led Transparency Toolkit to discover previously unknown intelligence-related keywords and in some cases even conclude what those new keywords meant. 

Why this matters: Transparency Toolkit argues that collecting all this LinkedIn data allows the public to “better understand mass surveillance programs and research trends in the intelligence community.” ICWatch may certainly do that using what McGrath calls a “sousveillance state.” Instead of depending on leakers and journalists, scanning LinkedIn can employ NSA-style metadata analysis to get an idea of what the “watchers” are watching. But ICWatch may end up stonewalled in the future should the intelligence community enforce rules that prevent people from listing intelligence programs on their LinkedIn profiles.

Read more @ http://www.pcworld.com/article/2919975/new-database-taps-linkedin-to-watch-the-nsa-watchers.html 

 

If you have a Verizon phone, you may be able to sue the NSA

Today, a federal appeals court ruled that the bulk phone metadata collection program run by the National Security Agency that was brought to light thanks to the leaks of former contractor Edward Snowden was illegal, and not covered by Section 215 of the Patriot Act. But the ruling went further than that; it said, essentially, that anyone whose data was collected as part of the program, called PRISM, may be allowed to sue the NSA for harvesting their data.

Read more @ http://fusion.net/story/131854/if-you-have-a-verizon-phone-you-may-be-able-to-sue-the-nsa/ 

 

Metadata access is putting whistleblowers, journalists and democracy at risk

We should all be more worried about our metadata and who can access it, argues Ross Coulthart in his keynote address at the Press Freedom Dinner on Friday night.

There are probably more than a few journalists – and I used to be one of them – who scoff at the idea that they have to do any more than they're currently doing to protect their sources. In fact I think for a lot of us metadata sounds like a bit of a bore. I think we all reassure ourselves that our police and intelligence services have a lot more important things to worry about than who is leaking to Ross Coulthart or any other journalist. But I am here to disabuse you of that notion.

For at least 36 years, since 1979, police, government departments and a plethora of other bodies, have been allowed to request – without a judicial warrant – the telecommunications records of journalists to chase the sources of leaked government information that has appeared in their stories. Those records, known as metadata, include phone bills, the phone numbers called and the numbers that are calling us, it includes the name and address of every subscriber behind those numbers, even location data – where the phone is located. It includes the email addresses and whoever we've been exchanging texts or messages with. What metadata doesn't include is the content of any communication. But it is the digital trail between you and any person you're communicating with. And it's an incredibly powerful weapon to hunt down whistleblowers who leak information.

Read more @ http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/comment/metadata-access-is-putting-whistleblowers-journalists-and-democracy-at-risk-20150504-1mzfi0.html 


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~