Slashdot Mirror
NSA Wiretapping Whistleblower
Kagu writes "ABC News is running a short piece about an interview with former NSA Employee Russell Tice and his allegations that the NSA wiretaps are more pervasive than believed and used in ways he believes violated the law. "
A lot more info on this subject, including a transcript of the interview of Russell Tice by Amy Goodman, can be found here.
From the interview:
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Tice had his security clearance removed and was fired because of psychological concerns.
He is not infact a whistle blower but rather a disgruntled employee seeking some type of revenge.
I would investigate his motives before buying every bit of his story hook, line and sinker.
Eat a Chicken, You know you want to.
So they bend the rules a little and overlook some of our rights and suddenly they have a great tool for catching terrorists or anyone that uses the wrong language!
I hope you never become a "suspected terrorist" because nowadays, the word "suspected" seems to be equivalent with "guilty" in the eyes of Homeland Security.
My work here is dung.
"If you picked the word 'jihad' out of a conversation," Tice said, "the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing." According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.
It can be argued that people who don't want to have their conversations monitored will not use keywords such as these that tip off the eavesdroppers or technology that recognizes them.
And conversely, people may use meaningless conversations with many keywords to delay the processing of these investigations.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
That is possible. It is also possible that he tried to work out the problem within the system, approaching his superiors repeatedly about the legal and moral problems in what was going on, and this behaviour is what got him labeled as psychologically unstable. I'm not saying this is necessarily what happened, I'm just saying that it is hard to tell at this stage.
while people who supposedly "out" CIA agents, who weren't undercover in the first place, are "leakers."
Funny, I thought leakers was the term the Bush administration used. Y'know, before it was found out by the public that it was a Bush-friendly person who leaked the name.
Maybe we should settle for a solid background check and occasional polygraph tests? (Granted the polygraph tests have failed quite badly in some cases.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Tracing calls inbound or outbound to known terrorist phone numbers, in itself is probable-cause, no?
I'd say it is. I don't think anyone would disagree. Either you're intentionally missing the point in order to troll or you're just ignorant.
The point is the NSA needs A WARRANT to do the tap. Hell, FISA lets them get a retroactive warrant for up to 72 hours after the fact. What is stopping Bush & Co. from getting a warrant from a secret court that has never denied a single warrant application in all of 2004? Its very likely that they had no probable cause to monitor these people.
Just another non-issue.
Apparently the 4th amendment is a "non-issue".
matter of choice.
What choices we do make is what will define us as a people.
Some people are making bad choices and hurting and killing other people by the tens of thousands, some people are hurting far many more but killing far fewer.
I resent the fact that the president just couldn't be bothered to go and get the legal authorization 'post-facto'; perhaps because there was no authorization or justification to be granted; in which case he is a more paranoid bastard than Nixon ever was and doesn't deserve to finish his term in office (but the alternative is the veep? Would we really trust him?)
The alternative would be worse unless we would watch him like hawks.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
So get congress to write a new bill, don't just charge ahead and break the law.
It just shows you Bush's comtempt for the rule of law. They couldn't do what they wanted to do legally, so they just went ahead and did it anyway.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Back in the day, when people first started hearing about E-mail browsing by the FBI/CIA/whomever, we just started posting a list of words at the bottom of every e-mail to overwhelm their computers so they would stop doing that to regular citizens. While I don't really condone that activity, I can see a scenario where people might adopt saying "jihad" for hello and goodbye, just so that the wiretaps start getting applied to everyone. Of course, if a top campaign contributor's son/daughter gets wiretapped, all of a sudden there will be justice again.
stuff |
I WANT them to monitor them. ...
If it's a question of wrongfully monitor a couple of Americans or turn a blind eye to formenting terrorist plots, which do you pick?
Ask the "terrorist" Jose Padilla.
Three years in the slammer without a trial and when the case finally gets to the Supreme Court (the second time) the Bush administration slaps some charges on which have nothing to do with what he was being held for. Oh, but even though he's no longer allegedly a terrorist, Bush is still pushing to maintain his enemy combatant label, because without it, what his administration did to the man goes from "probably unconstitutional" to "immoral, unconstitutional, and blatantly illegal".
Hope you like that solitary confinement, because it has become increasingly apparent that the government has no intention of actually finding the truth.
Who went after CUM stains on a dress rather than Bin Laden?
Is it too much to ask to have a 'smart' guy running the free world?
And quit blaming Clinton for Bush's solid performance as Village Idiot.
The erroneous idea that "the ends justify the means" has become pretty deeply established in modern society. It is one of the main causes of our troubles. One of its many consequences is the disrepect of the rule of law.
Examples:
Holding 'enemy combatants' without trial and subjecting them to torture. "Who cares if it's against international law," his supporters say. "These are terrorists, and we'll be safer for it."
Or take Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco. For a time he was shooting out gay marriage licenses like some sort of machine of gun of love. It was clearly contrary to California law, but he didn't care. He and his supporters felt that such laws should simply be ignored.
Obviously the first example is more serious than the second. But in both it's the same type of problem at bottom. People are unwilling to compromise. So when put in charge, they simply do what they think is right regardless of what the law might say.
$NSA = "National Security Agency"; The NSA's job is to protect US National Security PERIOD! They have been in the intel biz for decades - this is nothing new. This was done with Congressional knowledge and approval. Certain people are "shocked" that this has occurred when in fact they were aware of this and past administrations have been doing the same if not much, much worse for decades. I am personally much more concerned about private companies abusing our privacy than the NSA. The vast majority of NSA staff are true patriots and are doing their best to protect us from the scum that are planning to smuggle and detonate nuclear weapons in the heart of our cities. This is serious people. Please wake up! There are people that hate us so much they want to utterly destroy us and our friends and allies and there is nothing anyone can do to get them to change their minds. These terrorists are NAZIs and they will attack us at every opportunity they get. This has nothing to do with anything we may or may not have done or our foreign policy or anything like that. There are a lot of evil people on this planet that wish to destroy us - this is a fact that we much accept. Terrorists cannot be reasoned with. If you give a terrorist an inch they will take a mile and more! We cannot give them what they want. They will never stop. Iran is already 0-48 months away from having 40-100 nuclear warheads and have been supporting terrorism for decades. Iran has already publicly declared they intend to destroy the US, Israel and Europe. This is not an empty threat, they are perfectly serious about it. Unless we do something to stop them the next 9/11 will certainly be a nuclear one. The free world needs to unite and defeat terrorists and terrorist states once and for all. You cannot appease terrorists or terrorist nations. The world is a mess and someone has to do something about it! Iran, North Korea, Syria and Lebanon need to be cleaned up, among others. Please stop playing politics with our national security! All parties need to grow up and stop playing politics with our national security! If certain people wish to hate the current administration that's their prerogative but if they compromise national security in the process then they deserve to pay the price. Live long and prosper!
This is an interesting perspective which I haven't though about before. Yet another reason why the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are complete failures in protecting our liberty from tyrannical government.
The problem with this is, who determines what the limits on this probable cause are? This surely opens up a huge avenue for potential abuse, where the government can give any old reason for spying on their internal political enemies and justify it as probable cause. And don't tell me it's not happening in this case. Anyone who trusts the government to use this power judiciously is the one wearing "rose colored glasses".
Bullshit. And I don't care who said it. Would you have preferred the US sit out WW2?
Personally, yes, I would indeed have preferred this. Why should we have been forced to pay for the protection of foreign governments, especially considering that the rich big busineses interests of this country are the ones who really profited? This was Europe's problem. They had plenty of chances to stop Hitler before the problem became uncontrollable, but they didn't.
Aside from that, war is undeniably the health of the state. It is the way our government continually increases their power over us. The truth is that man has an inherent right to his justly acquired property, and the only probable cause for initiating violence on another person is in self defense if this property is invaded. This basically makes all governments nothing more than a glorified band of murderous robbers. The less power they have over me, the better. The less chance of them surviving, the better. How's that for moral high ground?