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FBI Widens Use of National Security Letters
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports that the FBI has drastically increased its use of National Security Letters (NSL), which permit it to collect information without judicial oversight. According to the article, the use of NSLs is up by a factor of 100, and the records are kept forever (in the past they were thrown away if the subject was cleared). Deep in the article, the author reports that NSLs were used to collect records '[...] of every hotel guest, everyone who rented a car or truck, every lease on a storage space, and every airplane passenger who landed in [Las Vegas]' for a two week period, in response to a terrorism threat in 2003. Those records, apparently, will be kept forever by the federal government. There's an ombudsman, and a procedure to resolve complaints, but the mere existence of an NSL is secret, so it's not clear how anyone can complain!
That's SO inefficient. It's better to attach a RFID/GPS to every egg.
Another reason not to visit America.
When I was a kid I wanted nothing more than to emigrate to the US of A. At the moment, I don't even want to visit it as a tourist.
How things can change in less than a decade...
Did you guys really vote for all this, um, stuff? Take your country back.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
When we have sensible Supreme Court justices installed, who understand we're at war with an ideology that will never die, national security rules by the president will never be subverted by the meddlesome Congress. Or the people, who don't know enough about security intelligence to keep ourselves safe by electing Congressmembers. We need more justices like Roberts who insist on the privilege of the president to keep us safe, and out of the danger of risky "due process". Too bad we can't get Miers back, who saw the towering intelligence of our current defender. But Alito's committment to the security power of the supreme executive should keep us perfectly safe.
--
make install -not war
Welcome to Amerika, please surrender your rights here!
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
Only criminals will go to the trouble to avoid being caught in such a web of information collection, leaving innocent private citizens as the only victims in this process.
Like is said for gun control laws, if you outlaw it, only the criminals will have it. This sort of crap will ensure that only criminals are outside of the jurisdiction of legal daily surveilance, thus achieving nothing but ill will and a semi-police state.
If you think this is a troll, try again... When the government invents a reason to spy on you without your permission or that of the courts, they have found a way to be the big brother that we all despise and fear. Never mind tin-foil hats, when they know what you had for breakfast without having to lift a finger, the tin-foil hat does no good.
How long will it be before it is made illegal to thwart such efforts by use of misleading electronic activities, and botnets that spoil the information gathered with false information and misleading information. How long before identity theft is not the real problem, but being accused of anti-american activities is the problem because of clever botnets that have seeded the government databases with information about you and your activities?
Where is the oversight to stop the government from doing that, then arresting you on trumped up charges based on bad information... damn, the US started an entire war on bad information...
FSCK, this is bad!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
There's an easy solution.
Everyone should complain.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I recall posts from about 7 years ago where our American brethren would profusely claim such laws would (could) never exist in the U.S., and it was kind of comforting to know such a human-rights haven existed (contrast: we don't have a bill of rights in Australia).
But it's frightening how Uncle Sam has managed to sidestep such safeguards in the name of "national security".
I shake my head in disgust when I think of the governments trouncing basic rights to protect us against a threat that claims as many people per decade as cancer does in one day !!
I think the submitter missed an important part of the article, which is this quote[ ...In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined. ...]
This lack of respect to privacy is troubling....
Two points. One, you signed up willingly. Two, your credit card company doesn't have the power to tap your phone, arrest you, or interrogate you.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
And I thought the FBI was wasting time on porn cases and such, but the waste of time and effort that must of gone into that vegas data mining with such a wide net was epic. What could they hope to have found, considering the FBI hasn't managed to handle their other low level basic database problems so well. And considering all these false alarms they get as they roust people all over the world. Our street-level intelligence is truly clueless and out of touch and adding the epic waste of mass data mining is surely going to have the FBI chasing ghosts as our freedoms erode.
Vegas is probably the most surveilled city in the U.S. Keeping rental car records and hotel receipts pales in comparison to the information stored by the casinos. What's frightening is that the government collecting such information about ordinary Americans doesn't amount to much on its own in terms of fighting terrorism, but it would offer unscrupulous feds a convenient database of information for blackmail purposes (as well as for a variety of investigations, both legal and illegal). A call by the feds to your hotel/casino could probably garner fairly detailed information about your activities in the city, including video of most of your public activities on the strip and in many cases even your activities in your room. Again, if the suspect isn't holding a terrorist or mafia meeting in Vegas, such information is probably not worth much for investigative purposes, but imagine its utility for blackmail purposes.
No one who dies of cancer does so in a fiery ball that destroys a Billion dollars worth of infrastructure.
No, but when you add up the $100,000+ treatment costs of the millions of uninsured Americans who do get cancer that the government pays... well, guess what? Billions of dollars.
To quote one 'Madpride' from another board:
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
In the last ten years, traffic has killed about 400.000 Americans. Terrorism has killed less than 4.000. I'm still amazed how the American public is prepared the give up all kinds of civil liberties just to fight the risk that is 100 times smaller, not to mention that the success chances are doubtful. Accepting a small - tiny! - terrorism threat is a small price to pay for a free society.
There is some difference between a nickname on /. and having a full cavity search when entering the states.
It's not just this one thing. It's everything. The more I learn about and watch develop the current shape of the USA, the less I like it. The less I want to cross the atlantic, the less I want to be an American.
There is also a difference between the EU, where I have a right to view the data they have on me (and have it alter if necessary) and the US, where privacy is being eroded. And everything happens in back rooms, under the pretence of terrorism, deepening the culture of fear.
Was the culture of fear the best the states could create the last few hundred years?
This kind of thing is very clearly illegal under the fourth and fifth amendments. The lesson here, is that the constitution is no guarantee of our liberty. Freedon ultimately depends on the will of people to demand and enforce limits on government's continuous attempts to expand its power.
This will go on until someone who is presented with a "national security letter" says, "Fuck you, get a warrant", and is preparted to fight the case all the way to the supreme court.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Have you seen any terrorism here in the states since 9/11?
Yes.
Antrax (we still don't know what happened with that, right? Yeah, we're sure doing a bang-up job fighting terrorism), DC shooter, happy-face mailbox bomber (that was post-9/11, right? or was it right before? If it was the latter, then disregard it, obviously)
We had a major attack in '93, and another in '95 (IIRC), so that was a 2-year gap followed by a 6-year gap ('95-'01), and the second one was domestic terrorism, so it was 8 years between "Al Qaeda" attacks. Yes, there were the embassy bombings, but putting aside that whole "embassies are technically US territory" thing, those were in other countries, and we've certainly lost a lot of people in foreign countries to similar attacks since 9/11, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's only been 4 years since 9/11. If we go another 4 or 5 without a foreign-origininating attack, we'll be doing OK I suppose, though with only 2 prior major foreign attacks to work with, it's not like we've got enough data points to say much about this anyway, so arguments either way using this information are rather pointless. It could be that the 8-year span was an unusually short one anyway, or maybe unusually long. There's no way to tell.
All before 2001 or not in the states. Fact is, the current administration is doing great -- and that makes those abroad that don't like a unipolar world upset; and it makes those on the left domestically jealous. Iraq has been expensive -- more than 2,000 American soldiers -- but that chaos and killing is over there -- not here. And it would have been there and larger if we wouldn't have gone to Iraq anyway. Too bad the world doesn't recognize the sacrifice our sons and daughters have made for them.
Most people in the states don't worry about these "privacy issues." If they ever result in a true infringement of rights, they'll get repealed. Most likely they won't even come close. Why do I really care if someone in the government knows I was in Las Vegas on some date? The answer: I don't. I'd rather just make it easier for them to catch Ali trying to blow up my office.
>Did you guys really vote for all this, um, stuff? Take your country back.
Do you really think the average voter has any idea what a national security letter might be and if they did the proper checks and balances such a thing would need. Or if they are even aware of the big privacy debate going on? They don't. During the last election, from what I was told first hand, people voted on:
1. Terrorism: Usually "Bush will teach them 'Rabs" kind of attitude.
2. Gay marriage: This was surprisingly everywhere before the election and no where now. Funny how that works.
3. Abortion: The usual crap here.
4. Vietnam: Kerry's status as a vet opened up the old vietnam wounds.
Only political junkies cared about privacy, civil rights, economic stability, social security, judge appointments, etc.
I don't think most countries are too different, the LCD tend to vote on hot button issues and the educated and elitist classes take on everything else. Asking "Did you people really vote for this stuff" is kinda non-starter. People don't even vote on this stuff, they vote for what they know.
Essentially this is your classic "raise the discourse" argument, but one of the nice things of being at the top of the world as a superpower in about a dozen different ways is that there's little incentive to learn about foreign policy, civil issues, other countries, other systems, etc. As long as there is wealth and safety one can remain fairly ignorant of a lot of things. This eventually does bite one in the ass and will probably coincide with the loss of a superpower status as Europe and Asia keep rising.
The traffic accidents of which you speak did not:
1) Cause billions of dollars of damage in less than an hour's time and shut down an entire industry for days.
2) Generally result from malicious intent from people who have declared they will not be happy until millions of Americans are dead
3) Paralyze an entire nation's ability to move people and goods
4) Happen as the result of an accident
Also, please provide a source for your 400,000 dead in past four years statistic. Statistics I've found from 1998 say around 49,000 died in North America from car accidents that year. Sounds like you're pulling your numbers out of thin air.
"American soil is safer than ever. And whenever a terrorist travels to Iraq and gets swiss cheesed by one of our boys, it is even safer."
Too much Fox News for your 2 neurons, eh...
Let's try this in simpler terms. Our invasion and continued occupation of Iraq is making us MORE at risk of attack not less.
Here is your assignment:
Assume another country, say China since they would have the resources, decided to invade the US on the grounds that we have WMD. Further say that they, not us, will be the ones to "rebuild" after the invasion sending our economy into the toilet (as if it wasn't already there). Would you fight with any means at your disposal including terrorist acts? Would you continue fighting even after they "won" the war?
That is exactly what is going on. The longer we stay there the more likely we are to have another 9/11. And while we are on the subject, why was it only AFTER 9/11 that the US decided to take terrorism seriously? You mean to tell me the other pre-9/11 attacks were unworthy of changing how we dealt with terrorism?
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
You can love your country and hate the current administration. There is no conflict between those positions.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
While the "internet" came out of a US DARPA research project in the 1960's, it was little more than an obscure research channel until the development of the web. This was done at the CERN Physics lab. If you don't know where the CERN lab is, I'll give you a hint. Start looking in Europe.
Because then we expected death to come in the form of bombs on ICBMs, or perhaps as armies marching across Europe. Nobody figured that an individual would do much damage.
Not that an individual couldn't do some damage, but it wouldn't particularly advance the USSR's goals to kill a few people at a time (or even a few thousand). And if they did piss us off by, say, flying planes into a few buildings, we knew right where the USSR was and could drop a few bombs of our own on it.
The war we're engaged in now is one of individuals doing a little bit of damage at a time. It can't bring down the US the way a full-on war with the Soviets could, but it is very demoralizing to be subject to terror attacks and it does lousy things to the economy. And when it happens, there's no place to bomb in retaliation (at least not without filling the media with pictures of civilians killed in the process.)
The old enemy wore uniforms, so you can't even tell which of those dead civilians really were planning to kill you.
So they check the individuals a lot more closely, both on entry and in the country. Illegally closely, perhaps, but that's not my point. You can, perhaps, feel safer knowing that the odds of you being wiped out along with the entire rest of the country in a nuclear holocaust are far, far lower than they were two decades ago. But it'll still kinda piss you off if you happen to be in the vicinity of a dirty bomb, suicide bomber, or whatever nasty trick they come up with next.
The problem is that corps., and any association, are groups of people.
Corps are subdivided groups. The employees typically do not have much say over how politically active the firm is. Often the political activity of the firm is inimical to the employees (outsourcing, anyone?), the general public (e.g. any spending by tobacco companies), or the environment (DuPont, Halliburton, Union Carbide, Ford, GM, etc.) The concentration of wealth has created a concentration of power. I like the free market as much as the next guy, I'm just saying we've gone much too far. America is much more in the grasp of the Corporation now than it was in the 1950s, even considering the burgeoning 'military industrial complex.'
Thanks for the feedback.
He wants his agenda back.
In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.
Is it just me, or does this demonstrate nothing but the most vile contempt for the citizens of the U.S.?
You are "spot on-target"!
The regime currently in power is using the "war on terrorism" to strip Americans of their rights, especially that of privacy. They justify their unconstitutional methods with the claim that "no further acts of terrorism have been committed on US soil", while totally side-stepping the reality that Al-Queda seems to spend a lot of time (between terrorist attacks) to plan their next offensive.
The Dubya regime has been just as ineffective in their optional war in Iraq as in securing the USA's borders and seaports. The President, Vice President, Attorney General, Director of the CIA, Director of the FBI, and Director of Homeland Security have all come out at various times to state that "it is not a matter of if, but of when then next terrorist attack will come". By "predicting" such an event, they presume to "cover their collective backsides" when it comes to accepting responsibility/blame for their ineffectiveness.
I fear that when AL-Queda does eventually attack the USA again, it will be far more spectacular than 9/11/2001, just as that terrorist attack far exceeded the results of the first World Trade Center bombing. Considering the state of the world today, I have concluded that they will use WMDs that they either can steal or purchase on the black market.
I love what gets deemed as insightful here. This'll be a good one for the meta mods.
:) :) I would not presume to revoke your geek-card over the esthetic appreciation of some humorous item.
Slashdot is primarily populated with geeks/hackers. That geek population will mod geekish things geekily. Most meta-mods will be geeks and I doubt they will have a serious objection to the insightful mod.
One of the pecularities of geekish humor is the earnest application of intelligence to an absurdity. It tends to be both funny and insightful. The fact that intelligence was humorously applied to an absurdity does not (in the geek mindset) diminish the inherent value of the creative intellectual contribution. His post was indeed insightful, he provided at least a one billion fold increase in efficency to the suggested system.
Maybe you're a bit too normal to get the peculiarly geekish appreciation in that
And if you do consider yourself a geek, well no offence intended by that last comment
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.