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Sorry, Wrong Wiretap
Rick Zeman writes "CNN is covering a little-mentioned Inspector General's report which mentions that the FBI 'sometimes gets the wrong number when it intercepts conversations in terrorism investigations' due to various reasons, and that 'The FBI could not say Friday whether people are notified that their conversations were mistakenly intercepted or whether wrongly tapped telephone numbers were deleted from bureau records.'"
the perfect excuse.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I wonder if anything picked up on a unintentional wiretap is still admissable in court - could provide for a nasty loop hole...
To put the tinfoil hats away, or throw them out. Some want us to believe that the government is capable of all this conspiracy crap.... Hell, they can't even use the toilet by themselves if you look at stories like this one. Carnivore was supposed to be scary... the only real thing scary about it was the shortage of harddrives that it promised to create storing all those email messages... and I KNOW they weren't going to get away with using Exchange to store them!
The government might be ominous, but its run by humans, and they are too busy tripping on their own resume's to do anything truthfully scary. Its only individuals who are left without oversight that can be scary... groups of people.. pfft! Hitler and Mousolini were individuals... groups of people just don't manage to get it together fast enough or hard enough... self regulating so to speak...
Now, if individuals are doing wiretaps... could be different
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Does anyone expect privacy on the phone lines anyway? If you do, and you're up to no good, you're an idiot.
Now that's a fucking lame excuse for breaking my rights.
But, you do bring up a point that a lot of folks have been asking- especially after Katrina.
There was advanced warning of a disaster, and there still was a lack of coordination and a delayed response. If TSA and local authorities couldn't get their act together with advanced warning, what are they going to do if we get attacked? And you're exactly right: How is it that these billions of dollars are being spent just to get what we saw these last few weeks?!?
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
In other news:
Police sometimes arrest the wrong people who haven't committed any crime.
Juries someimte convict the wrong person.
The FBI isn't perfect.
This is not exactly earth-shattering news here, unless you believe the government is some evil,perfect conspiracy out to get you. There's very little news value in this story.
Scuttlemonkey, why'd you have to make that dig about saying oops makes it ok? Nobody would say that, so why'd you have to flamebait like a troll? The editors just get worse and worse.
Show me a man that has never broken the law and I'll show you a man that has never driven a car.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Do you report yourself when you run a red light ?
When you make a mistake on your taxes in your favor ?
When the cable company is accidentally giving you free porn ?
What would be the actual upshot of the FBI reporting these errors ? We'd have another source of employment for lawyers and another way to waste limited law enforcement resources.
The pursuit of criminal and or investigations is both a legitimate and neccesesary function of the government. The prople that complain most about the government doing its job are the same people that get the most upset when something untoward occurs.
What scares me most are the 38,514 hours of audio backlog to be translated. That's over 4 years worth of audio! "Hey boss! I've got some intel about a bombing in a city... but it already happened 2 years ago..."
Radicode
The Cambodians had an evil machine run by groups of people that killed millions. So did Stalin, In the last 100 years think of all the evil that "groups" of people have carried out.
Governments dont have to be efficient, in fact the incompetence is what is scary. Innocent people will get screwed and the guilty will go free. The commies failed because even though they killed a lot of people, it was not necessarily the people they wanted to get. That's what the lack of oversight brings. The reason oversight is frowned upon is so that mistakes can be covered up.
If you are innocent, beware of inefficient groups of people.
Sadly there are those who dont care if there are innocent people getting screwed, as long as it's not them and they feel safe.
It's cheaper to "sacrifice" some innocents than to find out if their punishment is deserved.
Why do you think people support the idea of not finding out whether a non citizen is guilty before locking them up for life in Gitmo?
I'm keeping my tinfoil hat on. Tight.
I read the wire article in the local newspaper and can tell you that the "Court" is a secret court that hands out the permission to do the taps. This is set up under the PATRIOT Act that gives permission for wiretaps based on suspicion that the suspect is a "terrorist".
Most people don't have to worry until they "accidentally" ask for a tap on your phone, e-mail address, and wireless phone. Even a payphone you might just use! The problem here is FBI "error", which makes me think that the court isn't asking enough questions.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Very simple. Read some history. Read about Hoover's direction of the FBI, McCarthy, COINTELPRO, and REALIZE, that one of the primary roles of the FBI (at least within the past 50 years) has been to trample all over people and freedom in general. Not terrorists, PEOPLE...American citizens...supposedly living in a 'free' country.
>they need not tell me so as long as they destroy the data.
That's nice, in theory.
But how do they know they destroyed the data? For all they know, they could have a rogue agent who takes delight in releasing information to Drudge, or to an identity theft ring, or to his KGB handlers. Shouldn't you have a right to know, even after the fact, of a possible compromise of your personal information?
Hmmm...what was that? Something about the constitution? Wasn't that like a boat or something in the civil war?
Most people in the US would rather wipe their ass with it than try to read and comprehend it.
And then the people elect officials with the same view. Over the past few years "We The People..." have sat idly by as all those flag wavers in raped and pillaged the founding document of this country.
We let them do it. We encouraged them to do it. And some seem so shocked when they hear about it.
It's comedic and sad at the same time.
~X~
~X~
Police routinely face armed residents when they break into homes, or apprehend in cars. That's why police are well trained, highly armed, come in force of numbers. Many police are shot, often fatally. Yet the residents rarely avoid capture, and usually are shot, and killed, themselves, in the shootout.
Those facts are among the stark facts that make the "we need private guns so we can inhibit the police state" line of propaganda so clearly invalid. The police and army, armed forces of the state, are going to destroy any armed resistance. Widespread armament just escalates the conflict, when it occurs, to ensure people are killed, the state's forces dehumanize the people they're attacking. And that the people kill each other, while they're waiting to defend from the police "takeover". In reality, we have decades of experience in countries around the world showing that nonviolent resistance is a much more effective way to oppose state rule by force. Neither strategy works very well, but "armed resistance" doesn't work at all, and "nonviolent resistance" works more often than not, while preserving the people's life, dignity and organization until a confrontation that the people can win.
--
make install -not war
The problem with communism is that Marx, by condoning (or even promoting?) violence as a valid means of achieving communism, put a substantial flaw in the "design"/implementation plans.
That opened a much larger window for the evil and violent sociopaths to get to the top and start running the show.
Otherwise, you might just have the run of the mill sociopaths, who would be like those parasites that don't inflict so much harm to their hosts. If you are fortunate some of those sociopaths might actually choose to be symbiotic.
Why should they tell people their phones were tapped and conversations recorded? I'd bet that the people involved would get vocal about wiretaps.
That's exactly why they should. If mistakes had real consequences for the agency, there would be fewer mistakes.