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Limited Email Surveillance Approved
MrNougat writes "CNet reports that some surveillance of your email has been permitted by U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan in Washington, D.C., without first requiring any evidence of wrongdoing. Curiously: 'instead of asking to eavesdrop on the contents of the e-mail messages, which would require some evidence of wrongdoing, prosecutors [of the US Justice Dept.] instead requested the identities of the correspondents. Also included in the request was header information like date and time and Internet address--but not subject lines.'"
Hey, you're still kind of free. Well, free-ish. I'm sure your government is doing this for your own good. There couldn't possibly be any other reason.
In my opinion, if you're not already assuming that the contents of your unencrypted email are public to the world, you're fooling yourself. If you want it to be unreadable, encrypt it.
I think the only permission anybody ought to need in order to eavesdrop on a communication is the owner of the wire. If you're contracting with the owner of the wire for services, and privacy is important to you, make that part of the contract. Or save yourself some effort and money and simply encrypt your communications. It's nearly effortless. It won't cost you anything (money wise) for the software.
Also, I take exception with the summary that "some surveillance of your email has been permitted." The article says, "the Justice Department asked a federal magistrate judge to approve monitoring of an unnamed person's e-mail correspondents." I sincerely doubt that I am that person or one of his correspondents, unless he is a spammer. I recognize this could affect me in the future because a precedent has been set ... but again, that's easily handled with encryption now, isn't it?
Complaining about this is tantamount to making love to your wife in your open front doorway and then demanding a law be passed to protect your privacy from your neighbor or the police car driving by. For crying out loud! Isn't some burden on you to secure your own privacy? This is not so far from the DMCA requiring legal protection against breaking "protection mechanisms" that are not effective in the slightest. Why in the world would you trust the government enough to expect them to take responsibility for securing your privacy?
People seem to be looking for an expensive legislative solution to a technological problem that already has an inexpensive technical solution.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Everyday I feel more like I'm Chinese....
We have the same law proposed here. It stranded due to the politicians lack of technical knowledge. They think that the To: From: and CC: field actually tells you who sent the email and to whom. It's extremely difficult to tell a non-tech savvy person that these header fields are purely cosmetic.
This leads me to wonder, are there regulations in place saying how long a US ISP must maintain email logs for? If not, do any ISP's actually publish their data retention policy?
Regarding that "curiously", long-standing precedent regarding phone surveillance makes a distinction between surveillance which reveals "public" information, analogous to the outside of an envelope (the parties in communication and the times of their contacts) and that which reveals "private" information (i.e. the actual content of their communications). IANAL, but I'm fairly sure the police are allowed to get the phone company's records of the recipients and times of your phone calls. ("LUD"s, for all you Law and Order junkies). This is a logical extension of the same policy.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
this is akin to the nsa approach to collecting 'chatter' - a tree of correspondence without focus on the content of the communication.
There's two choices for us now. Either you can install GPG (works well with a particular Thunderbird extension) or send pictures of your penis to the agency responsible for reading the emails. Personally, I've started doing the former and as soon as I get my digital camera some batteries will start doing the latter. A picture of my penis that says in the subject line "SURVEIL THIS" will (with any luck) deter them from surveillance. If not, some goatse or tubgirl oughtta do the trick.
This idea is made of crap and stupid. What, are they just trying to scare people into not using e-mail if they're going to blow something up, or do they actually care if someone is sending e-mail from a spoofed site named "rofl.mao"?
http://www.pgpi.org/
You only lose any Rights you haven't used within the last 90 days.
Now, you have to prove to the government that you're actually using any Rights you want to hang on to.
I recommend calling and sending real letters to your CongressCritters.
There is a protocol that supports end to end encryption, ESMTP. I use courier-mta on Linux as my mail server, sendmail also supports it. The problem is there are those admins that are clueless and don't know about ESMTP encryption or don't care or use older MSwindows. If I required TLS I could not send half my mail.
This protocol would only protect against passive snooping, if the DNS was poisoned then the man-in-the-middle attack would work if they did not have a signed certificate.
I'm thinking they should team up with ThinkGeek and hand out shirts to all those who take advantage of this ruling - http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/frustrations/31fb /
If big boobed women work at Hooters do one legged women work at IHOP?
Who sends email to Mr. B.
Who sends email to Mrs. C.
Yeah, you see where this is going. Just about anyone can be connected to anyone else with enough hops.
And the government would be "justified" in collecting the information on each of the people in those hops because those people are "connected" to someone under investigation.
PGP may make email correspondence with most users, including virtually all webmail based users, impossible.
May the Maths Be with you!
I am wondering if the people doing the surveilance will care about stopping at their own borders. Sure it is probably ok if they read an email that I send to one of my friends or co-workers in the states, well aside from the co-workers as that sometimes contains confidential information, but are they going to stop at reading the email that I send here in Canada. With what I have seen so far there does not seem to be anything stopping them and with the technical knowledge that most of the people making decisions seem to have they could easily argue something that would enable them to get away with reading the email that everyone in the world sends. If the American laws state that it is ok for them to read emails, sure it is just read sender and recipient right now, I have no problem with them doing it as long as they are only reading emails send to or received by Americans, in America.
Welcome to the land of the 'free' and the home of the surveilled.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
exactly, try explaining how it works to your average Outlook User, never mind your non-pc-literate friends, most people dont use encryption because it is way too hard to understand and use, it has to be made simpler (ie. seamless/hidden/on-by-default) if its to be adopted by the masses
http://www.aclu.org/pizza/
Religion and politics, without the flame. godgab.org
How about the phone calls — couldn't they always observe, who is calling a suspect, even if the actual listening requires a judicial warrant?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
First of all, employers have been monitoring e-mail for years and we all know how fundamentally unsecure plain text e-mail is. Just like your regular paper mail, if you want to have some privacy, use some measures to conceal the content. If you send postcards all the time, don't expect any privacy.
ConsultingFair.com
This is already the case with any phone call you make. The police can pull the luds on the phone and know what numbers you called and for how long. They have no idea on the content how ever. And I don't believe they need a warrent to get this information.
This is the same thing only for email. Instead of a list of numbers, they get a list of email address and times that you've sent stuff too. No content, no subject lines.
Just Jimmy@MyMail.com emailed Jonna@YourMail.com at 9:37pm on 02/06/2006.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Thanks to boring people, world is moving towards a total lack of privacy. The governments want to be in on every piece of human interaction. Not only that, they wish to record it too.
..worldwide .. no place to run style .. if it hasn't already for muslims .. where one can no longer can you be silly on the phone. No longer can you make racially biased or culturally insensitive jokes even among non-racist friends. I hope our body is well toned, for it'll be on camera .. you don't want your friendly monitors laughing at you. You have to worry about everything you say on the phone. You can't ask about the weather even because you'll have to worry about whether it'll be interpreted as meaning something else ("why would you care about weather in some other country"). No longer can you raise your voice to your own child. No longer can you tell little white lies to hold on to some image. On the "bright" side .. you won't be able to cheat on your girlfriend.
.. Sorry but I only give to Caesar what belongs to him.
Soon a day will come
They already want to be in on every financial interaction (sales/income tax). I rather pay a flat amount every year for "my share" of defense costs and be done with it. Are they going to ta happiness too soon? "You exchanged happiness, we want out fair share cause you wouldnt have been able to exchange happiness was it not for us"
I value my privacy, and I believe that the fourth amendment makes America a strong nation. The founding fathers of the USA understood that the right to privacy is one of those inalienable human rights endowed by our creator. (if you read the first amendment you will see that that it's a right "ot to be violated", rather than a gift from government. I believe the right to privacy is what keeps a nation free from oppression, tyranny, and pathological dictators. Fuck all the fake patriots who'll sell us otherwise.
Since it's a Grand Jury investigation, the regular 4th Amendment (search and seizure/probable cause) rules are relaxed. A Grand Jury subpoena only requires that the information obtained isn't a fishing expedition.
This isn't another spying story- grand juries have had the power to read all of your documents to determine if a crime has been committed for hundreds of years.
to see if his girlfriend is talking to other guys.
The ethics of recording for criminal activities over an extended period of times is dubious. How many of you would like it if your local police department recorded speeders over a period of 1 month on video and sent out notices for every time you sped .. the first time you "get caught"?
Somehow I think many of us would be against that particular thing. But hey privacy is only for those who have soemthing to hide. NOT.
Sounds like somebody's trying to make the world's largest spam list. Should go something like this: 1) Work your population into a lather of fear. 2) Get a grand jury to let the cops find out who you email. 3) Profit!!!
-Pizentios
You're semi-free.
You're quasi-free.
You're the margarine of free.
You're the Diet Coke of free.
Just one calorie, not free enough!
Those stickers that say "I read your email" suddenly take on new meaning.
And will be featured in special editions of the 'Despair' and 'Demotivator' calendars if you pre-order now.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
did you read the article or the summary?
whats next? you have to store your files where the government can look at them whenever? you have to live in a plastic box with bars over it and camera survelance on you? concentration camps? thought monitoring? so you can be scrutinized and analyzed and your everythought crossreferenced with everything else to determine if you one day might think of doing something criminal? its going to be like the movie minority report, only worse.
we are losing our liberties faster than we can blink, life under a microscope is not freedom
Well, there is an easy way to check if you're being monitored:
1. CC (or BCC) o.bin-laden@aljazeera.net in every email.
2. Wait 10 minutes.
3. Look outside.
Nothing unusual - you're fine.
Black vans start pulling up, neighbours with a two mile radius have been told to "go for a walk" - yup, you were right to be paranoid after all.
They are being treated the same way as phone records. Phone records (originating number, terminating number, etc) are not considered the same way as the *content* of the call itself. The records can be obtained with a simple subpoena. A log entry that shows some originating email address sent mail to another without revealing the content of the message is quite analogous.
I forget the case/legislation that established that difference in treatment. Someone else might can followup with that.
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
Government concerns aside, if you have something in any way, shape, or form, that you consider to be sensitive or private, WTH WOULD YOU PUT IT IN AN EMAIL? I mean seriously, nevermind that government could read it, what about any hacker or shady type with any sort of desire to read your email and any bit of technical knowledge.
I can't believe some of the stuff that people will put in an email that can be intercepted, forwarded, CC'd etc.
Police have long been able to record the telephone numbers that you're dialing without a warrant. The idea is that the information you give a third party (like the phone number you're dialing to the phone company) isn't protected. Similar information comes from the header of e-mails -- you have to tell your ISP where it's going, so they're the third party.
The interesting case is going to be when your computer sends the e-mail directly to your friend's computer. In that case, there is no third party.
From this, I get the feeling this has nothing to do with email content. If
the feds are looking for someone, the body/subject of the email may be
unimportant. After all, it could be encrypted in some fashion that the feds
are unable to decrypt.
The headers are gold tho. The headers can help the feds trace down a
suspected terrorist, here's an example.
1) Assume we have been tracking some terrorist in the US. We haven't
arrested him because we are hoping he will lead us to a big fish. So, we
install some monitoring software on his PC.
2) Eventually, he sets up a bogus hotmail account and then emails the big
fish about his current email address.
3) The feds sit and wait for one of two options.
..Option 1) If possible, they monitor for that big fish to check his email.
As soon as that account is logged into, we trace his IP and find out where
he is. That of course depends on the email provider notifying us as soon as
it's check. It could be most difficult if that ISP is not a US friendly
ISP.
..Option 2) We wait for the small fish to start receiving emails to his
bogus account. We can't read the body of the email (because it's
encrypted), but we can look at the originating IP and trace it back to its
source. It's slower than option 1, but hopefully the big fish will still be
sitting behind his PC when we drop the bomb. Or if we are lucky, we capture
him and then get him to decrypt the emails for us.
Another perk of knowing who the small fish is emailing, is that if the Big
Fish's email host happens to be US Friendly, then we can monitor the big
fish and see who else has been emailing him and then repeat the process
again. It's possible that you could build up a fairly large matrix pretty
quick.
I like Chinese. They only come up to your knees.
u alObligations/ILoveChinese
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Scripts/Contract
I've got a little karma to spare. Slashdot can be fun :)
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
They are seeking to get the routing information of email. They must certify that it is needed for an ongoing investigation, but need not certify that the person is accused of any wrongdoing. This is hardly a huge leap in caselaw, just a new extension for the digital age. If you really feel threatened by it use hushmail. This is not a huge change in our existing privacy rights. Hell if the post office kept that kind of information I'm sure the police could get routing information there too ( if they don't already ).
So hold on to your tin foil beanies, the sky is not falling.
You know, looking at the address and the return address on the envelope for regular mail doesn't require, iirc, a warrant.
Best Slashdot Co
This is definitely not "it". The surveillance of every single out-of-country phone call might have been "it". Some of the dozens of things the government has/hasn't gotten in trouble for doing illegally might have been "it". But this is, seriously, nothing.
..." It's only at the end of the process that you wake up, look around, and ask, "Where did freedom go?"
You make an important point, but probably not the way you intended.
There is no "it." There is no one big, dramatic thing the government does that says, "This is the point where we're no longer free." France did not tumble overnight into the Reign of Terror. Russia did not go in a day from Revolution to purges and gulags. Germany did not start building death camps as soon as the swastika flew over the Reichstag. Cuba was as free as any country on Earth the day Castro took power.
Etc. Tyranny doesn't happen in an instant. It happens steadily, insidiously, and at every point there are people saying, "Oh, this isn't so bad, and it's for our own good
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
So, see, you're wrong. While those more difficult-to-eavesdrop-on methods are available to our enemies, sometimes, sometimes, they forget and set up simple, unencrypted hotmail accounts. Sometimes they use their credit card numbers without a secure sockets layer, too, and we get the numbers and use them to charge ammunition for the war against terror.
Thus argueth the Attorney General of the United States of America.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
that they read my email to osama@goingtoblowupamericalikeamotherfuckerandbush isandasshole.com?
Lighten up. Its only a post.
Mail2Web.
Last time I checked, it posted it's IP address on the header not the IP address of the PC you logged in from.
What difference does it make what's "allowed", and what's "legal"? The Bush administration has made it clear they intend to do whatever they think is "necessary" regardless of what Congress, the Supremes, or the unwashed masses have to say about it. And, they intend to keep it all secret, so as to avoid all this hand-wringing as much as possible.
Most people don't even think inside the box.
http://www.gnupg.org/
Penny - plain text accounting
Our congress is not allowed to ask questions of people involved in the Katrina response due to the current White House administration's need for private communications.
Our congress is not allowed to know about the meetings between the Vice President and Oil/Energy (read Enron) Executives, due to their need for private communications.
This sounds(sadly)like a Slashdot "in Soviet Russia" joke!
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
You do wrong by writing "wrongdoing".
True, a mail cover doesn't require a warrant. But those involve mail already being handled by a former government, and now quasi-government agency. This development forces the cooperation of private companies in an electronic mail cover.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
The SMTP servers know the IP-address of the incoming message and know who you are asking to forward the message to. ISP's can map customer IP-addresses to a subscriber. So the information is there. A News caster will reword all of that in terms that the average reader will easily understand. that is TO: FROM: and DATE: The information is there. Just not where you are looking for it.
This is for a GRAND JURY. They've had the ability to go through your documents in order to determine if you've committed a crime for DECADES. The 4th amendment does not apply TOO much considering this is for a criminal investigation already underway, for a court and jury.
You can loosen the grip on your mouse, now, people. Nothing UNUSUAL to see here, move along.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The solution is obvious. Install GNU Privacy Guard or a similar OpenPGP implementation, and use it all the time for even the most innocuous of messages. Make encryption the rule rather than the exception. Distributors may want to think about having key generation done as a standard part of installation, with public keys being uploaded to a central server as soon as an internet connection becomes available, and enabling GPG by default.
While it is not the be-all-and-end-all of personal security, encryption - if used properly - is an important step. And it becomes easier to identify your friends; any message which is not encrypted is obviously spam. It will also make everything a lot harder for the authorities.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Why? Because it costs money. PGP costs money, and since no one uses it, companies don't bundle it.
Perhaps GnuPG? Well, there's the whole problem with the GPL (esp. V3).
Additionally, the changes PGP require to mail are irksome. How you you receive PGP mail over a mailing list? Well, it's a pain, if it works at all.
The funny thing about all this is that the article (even the summary) mentions that the data collected here is only the From:, To: and CC: lines. PGP can't protect those lines (subject either).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If you accumulate information about who talks to whom, when, how often, and whether they get replies, you are doing "Traffic Analysis"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_ana lysis) and getting valuable intelligence.
Wiretapping law has distinguished between content and header-like information for a long time. Before Skype, even back before email, people used to communicate using devices called "telephones" which set up point-to-point voice grade audio streams. Police would sometimes record, not the actual audio, but just the addressing information that showed who communicated with whom. The laws about wiretapping made it easier to get permission to record traffic patterns than to record conversations.
I have no points to lend but I gotta say, good point. Too often people look for the straw that broke the camel's back when the problem isn't with the one straw, it's the field of straw on the camels back in the first place. I mean who put's straw on a camel now? It's all done by big combines and wagons. Ok, that went a bit farther than I intended but I want people to read your comment so the more replies you have the better it looks right?
....... Thus ends my attempt at wit or whatever
We're not even free-ish. The boundaries of control are just closing in on us. People in power always fight against individual freedoms because that's what maintains their influence.
Apparently, they'd already interviewed a bunch of my co-workers about me before they came to my apartment. It became a perpetual joke around the shop. "Hey Krum, been visited by the FBI lately?"
The slogan you refer to has been updated. It's now "Land of the fee, Home of the slave".
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Bring on the spam, then no one can tell what you are doing or not doing.
Write auto-responders that reply to every piece of spam. It doesn't matter if the reply address is any good or not. Clog the internet mail with junk and . . . Oh never mind, all this is already happening.
Damn...been a long time since I've played with nym accounts and remailers, but, at least that will confuse them for fun for a bit....with multiple bounces and each remailer stripping off header info, and encryption the whole way...would be near impossible for them to trace anything.
Time to go do some research on what servers are still out there...and creating reply blocks...and mixmaster....etc...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
that was awful! [grin]
you have no chance to privacy
make your time!!
We have the same law proposed here. It stranded due to the politicians lack of technical knowledge.
That is not entirely correct. The minister who was responsible for the law did understand it correctly, but the largest internet provider in Denmark apparently did not, and the opposition believed the internet provider.
Minister: You can record the needed traffic data without looking at any contents of the mail.
Internet provider: No we can't. We need to analyze headers if we must log CC: recipients too.
Pure bullshit from the internet provider. Mails to CC: recipients are sent with the "rcpt to: " SMTP command, exactly like mails to To: recipients, and both types can be logged without looking at header data.
The website anonymousemail.com is currently suing the government saying that the law is unconstitutional as it violates the First and Fifth Amendments.
You know, regular mail doesn't require a return address iirc.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
For each and every e-mail you send put the FBI, CIA, NSA, Whitehouse(.gov not .com) Congress, Supreme Court, State Assemblies, Governors, State Police, Local Police, City Council, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Ralph Reed, Bozo the Clown and your Homeowner's Association on your cc: list. That way we can make their job easier and feel safer when we send our kids to school in the morning and when we go to sleep at night.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
"The request had a twist: Instead of asking to eavesdrop on the contents of the e-mail messages, which would require some evidence of wrongdoing, prosecutors instead requested the identities of the correspondents."
Under the definitions in FISA (50 USC 1801):
(n) "Contents", when used with respect to a communication, includes any information concerning the identity of the parties to such communication or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of that communication.
Without reading the article:
-I back the statement about the To:, From: and CC: headers being cosmetic, in case people don't believe it.
It is easy to use false(or none at all) headers for those items and is well with in the protocol(i.e. not a hack).
Don't believe me? I'll send you a message addressed To: god@heaven.xxx.
Did they specify that these headers were the ones being opened and not the Received lines (which could be spoofed, but at least point one hop back from the last trusted host).
Are we talking about sniffing email in transit or taking it from inboxes?
-If it's inboxes, then there is no way you can be certain of who sent it, so this is a moot point.
-If we're talking in transit, then there's the possibility of forging and not collecting all the mail.
-If we're talking outgoing, then you need to touch a machine on each path someone might send mail out through.
Logs provide the correct information, which is the envelope To address--not the header To/CC addresses.
Envelope From addresses can be faked, but if you need to log in to send mail it will likely include your account name.
...is anon.penet.fi? With all the p2p and new technologies, why can't we come up with an alternative that EVERYONE can use to foil any snooping. Eventually, email will make us all criminals, if you send that Superbowl ad to your buddy or if you send plans for a nuke. If every email were encrypted and every ID were hidden...
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Redundant? What in the heck is this post supposed to be a "redundant" copy of?
In order for a comment to be redundant, some earlier poster (or the article) would have to have made essentially the same point. But that is not the case here.
Hmmm. Perhaps it's that you just don't like the opinions?
Vote Freedom First, so all the bumper stickers on the trucks say.
Now, which political group do you think that driver belongs to? Democrat or Republican?
Perhaps the reason why Democrat's don't have that sticker on their cars, is because they don't have to be reminded as often as the Republicans do.
I've got nothing to hide, but this is pure bullshit!
From this day on, I'm going to copy & forward ALL of my email to:
And if EVERYONE did that, this Illegal, invasive, crap might stop.
Fascist Bastards!
What the govenment is asking for is what the Sendmail (and general SMTP) manuals call Envelope information. They're also arbitrarily removing the Subject header line.
By your analogy -- given that most email is transmitted across the net in an entirely un-encrypted form, they would probably get access to the entire contents of the message (since a sysadmin would have the technical ability to read it without disturbing your ability to get it in it's original form). If the Pen & trap orders are OK, then I would expect that these 'envelope information' orders would be similarly OK... it's the same kind of information.
Not that I'm entirely comfortable with this, but I think that it's a reasonable compromise.
Where I'm still upset is that it seems like all that they're doing to get a 'PATRIOT Act' snoop orders OKd is saying (in a boilerplat) "I think that this information will be pertinent to an investigation", without even having to detail what they're investigating, what information they're looking for, or how it would help the investigation.
For all we know it could be a jealous cop investigating his wife for unfaithfullnes.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Since the 4th ammendment is generally interpreted as depending on a reasonable expectation of privacy...
As the amount of covert surveilance becomes more common (and more commonly known), doesn't this, in turn, reduce the cases where one may be interpreted as having a reasonable expectation of privacy, thus reducing the cases where warrents are needed (rinse&repeat 'till 4th ammendment is gone)?
Seriously, this should be modded up.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Don't know if anyone's posted this link to the ruling on the District Court of DC website:
0 06-MS-11~11:4:55~2-7-2006-a.pdf
http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/opinions/2006/Hogan/2
The link from the article refers only to devices that record numbers dialed after the device is installed - not to archives of previously-dialed numbers - shouldn't these still be protected?
The time information could be used to correlate interactions with past attacks (9/11, Millenium, etc). For instance, show me Bob's web +/- 1 week of 9/11.
If the information is being used this way, then I can see it as being potentially useful to law enforcement in trying to reduce massive amounts of data into something potentially actionable such as initiating additional surveillance on Bob.
The flip side of this is some spammer sends out email from a server in Pakistan. You happen to get this email. You live near a suspected terrorist. You happen to bank at the same place and order pizza from the same place as the suspected terrorist. You happen to have ordered a pizza on 9/10. You get a one-way ticket to Cuba.
On what grounds do you say that they are not effective against terrorism?
In Israel, bag/metal searches prevent terrorism and almost all terrorism acts had occurred where these searches were not enacted. The very few places where the search failed to prevent the terrorist act, are those were the search site itself was crowded.
Since when does permission matter when it comes to the government spying on citizens in USA?
oh yeah, one other point. Bush has been wiretapping and spying without warrants on EVERYONE for the last couple of years. He claimed at first to be following the FISA laws, then changed his story and then claimed that getting the rubberstamp warrant was too much trouble -- consistently lying in fact, because he doesn't need a warrant immediately. He can retroactively obtain one up to 72 hours after the spying begins.
His new justification? He doesn't have to follow any laws. As CinC, he IS the law.
Let's break it down. He can get warrants after the fact, basically a paperwork operation. He doesn't want to. Why? No warrants mean NO RECORDS OF WHO HE IS SPYING ON. If he had to go to the FISA courts, there'd be a record that could be perused ten years or more down the road. He doesn't want a record.
He's spying on his "enemies". That'd be Michael Moore, the ACLU, DailyKos, select reporters, all the others. We know for a FACT that Bolton, now ambassador to the U.N., was running the spy operation via the NSA listening in on the US National Security Council members in the time leading up to the Iraq invasion in order to get a fix on their efforts to hinder their plans. If they can justify that, they have no problem in spying on their opponents, and they must logically be spying right now.
They probably don't want to run their spy targets past the FISA judges because the judges would see the pattern and deny them the warrants.
Also, unverified news back up by observation: there's blackmail going on. Broad observation: why are key congressmen so bloody quiet under this extreme provocation? Why are news organisations so cowed?
I've heard som grim indications that Rove and company are using this goldmine of info to shut people up. Think about it. Every email you've sent in the clear. Every website, even "Russian schoolgirls in rubber suits", Congressman John Smith and his staff have visited, every phone sex number called, every escort service phone call, all the mistresses -- this, baby, is Total Information Awareness. They can nuke anyone from Internet orbit. Bush famously said he doesn't use email because he doesn't want people to read "his stuff". Duh.
By the way, TIA is now called Topsail.
http://buzzflash.com/farrell/06/02/far06003.html
Detention Camp Jitters
by Maureen Farrell
"Recent pronouncements from the Bush Administration and national security initiatives put in place in the Reagan era could see internment camps and martial law in the United States."
-- The Sydney Morning Herald, July 27, 2002
In 1984, the Rex-84 readiness exercise program was conducted by 34 federal departments and agencies, reportedly as an exercise to handle an influx of illegal aliens crossing the Mexican/U.S. border. Brought to Americans' attention during the Iran-contra hearings, the exercise, which was conducted alongside another drill, "Night Train 84," also tested military readiness to round up and detain citizens in case of massive civil unrest.
None of that ever happened, of course, and in many respects, it seems silly to even mention it. After all, other Reagan-era initiatives, like the Armageddon exercises Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld participated in, are far more interesting. Then, too, despite a brief moment of sunlight in the 1970s (when Congress, according to former President and CIA director George H.W. Bush, "unleashed a bunch of untutored little jerks out there"), emergency detention plans had been in place since the 1950s, without incident. Americans have not been herded into camps since World War II, so why worry about it now?
For some, the answer comes in the form of yet another government contract awarded to Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root to build "temporary detention facilities" in case of an "immigration emergency." Reminiscent of Rex 84, which was conducted on the premise of preparing for "an influx of immigrants," there is reason to believe that hoards of poor, tired immigrants are not the true concern. As Tom Hennessy of the Press-Telegram recently pointed out, "there already are thousands of beds in place at various U.S. locations for the purpose of housing illegal immigrants." So what else might these centers be used for?
Given predictions that another terror attack is all but certain, it seems far more likely that the centers would be used for post-911-type detentions of immigrants rather than a sudden deluge. "Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," Daniel Ellsberg remarked. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo." As it turns out, immigrants aren't the only concern. As a news brief in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains:
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a contract worth up to $385 million for building temporary immigration detention centers to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root. KBR would build the centers for the Homeland Security Department in case of an unexpected influx of immigrants or to house people after a natural disaster or for new programs that require additional detention space, the company said.
Hurricane Katrina gave Americans a glimpse of how a natural disaster scenario might play out. John Brinkerhoff, one of the FEMA officials behind the Reagan-era martial law and internment directives who "planned for the detention of at least 21 million American Negroes in assembly centers or relocation camps" began defending the Pentagon's desire to deploy troops on American streets in 2002, and sure enough, after Hurricane Katrina, Blackwater mercenaries were brought in to police the streets of New Orleans -- as soldiers were instructed to "shoot to kill" looters. Brinkerhoff also told PBS that, "The United States itself is now for the first time since the War of 1812 a theater of war. That means that we should apply, in my view, the same kind of command structure in the United States that we apply in other theaters of war."
Which brings us to the KBR spokesman's final statement regarding