obamaischeckingyouremail.tumblr.com

To the delight of White House detractors everywhere, a soon-to-be-viral single-topic Tumblr was launched on Saturday mocking President Barack Obama's involvement in the National Security Agency's controversial spying program. The photo-driven blog, obamaischeckingyouremail.tumblr.com, showcases out-of-context press images of an often gleeful President Obama—taken from Flickr, the web and elsewhere—looking at various computer screens and "checking your email." On Friday, Obama defended the NSA program on grounds that Americans must tolerate what he dismissed as "modest encroachments on privacy" in the name of security. Obama assured citizens that "nobody is listening to your phone calls" in the broad NSA phone sweep, and that the reported Internet-based surveillance "does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States." "You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president added. "We're going to have to make some choices as a society." In an interview published Sunday, Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old defense contractor employee who blew the whistle on the NSA program, told the Guardian newspaper that "the NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things," he continued. "I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under."

Obama and Joshua Generation

Obama to parishioners: Keep faith in hard times - Examiner.com

President Barack Obama is mixing lessons from the work of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. with reminders that those pushing for change must take heart and recognize progress when it comes.

The president stood in the pulpit of Washington's Vermont Avenue Baptist Church on Sunday, the eve of the federal holiday marking King's birthday.

Calling King and those who fought for civil rights the "Moses generation," Obama urged his audience - those he called the "Joshua generation" - to "get back to basics" as Americans face the challenges of a new age.

King himself spoke in 1956 at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, located less than 2 miles north of the White House. Freed slaves founded the church the year after the Civil War.