Domestic Spying Records Ordered Released

CokoBWare wrote to mention an eWeek report on the NSA's domestic spying program. A federal judge has ordered the Department of Justice to release records from the program by March 8th. From the article: "In ordering the Justice Department to expedite the FOIA request processing, Judge Henry Kennedy Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said that the department's opinion that it could determine how much time is needed was 'easily rejected ... Under DOJ's view of the expedited processing provisions of FOIA, the government would have carte blanche to determine the time line for processing expedited requests,'"

Comments

Deceptive headline

[dfenstrate]

Why is it called 'Domestic Spying' when the monitored conversations occured between foriegn, self-proclaimed enemies of the United States who are engaged in armed conflict with us, and people inside the United States?

That's surviellence of an enemy, and given the Presidents power to wage war, it's not any stretch of the imagination that this sort of activity is within his authority.

The problem with this entire debacle is that you have people who are trying to apply the law-enforcement model of handling things to a war. A guerilla War, to be sure, but a War nonetheless. Do you think that Britain and the US got warrants when they were trying to break Germanys enigma code in World War 2? Do you think they thought twice about intercepting any communications between Germany and the US? No, because we wanted to ultimately hunt down and kill those we were monitoring, those they were associated with, and break the will of Germany to wage further war. It's not pretty but it sure as hell is necessary.

Those who revealed this program have made us less safe, and made it more likely that people who want to do us harm will evade our survellience- all for some petty political points (backfiring, by the way. A significant majority of the US population approves of this activity, and they will be voting next election) and yet another chance to scream "ChimpyMcBushHaliburtonCheneyCabal is EVIL!" Yeah, AQ and gang likely figured they were being monitored, but they didn't always act like it from some reports. Thanks for reminding them and shoving it in their face every single day.

If you don't want to be monitored by the government, then don't talk to overseas agents of an organization that has killed Americans, wants to kill more, and is killing our troops every week. It's not that complex.

As for the supposed 'rights' of those inside the US, terms like 'traitor' are really underused lately, or they are simply foreign agents of an 'enemy'- a simple concept that so many have foolishly convinced themselves doesn't apply to anyone any more.

Either way, once we've gotten all the information we need from them, we should deal with them like we did in the last war we resolutely won: try and execute the traitors, kill the spies, and hold the footsoldiers as prisoners of war until the other side capitulates and hostilities cease.

Good thing the safety of the nation doesn't lie in the hands of pontificating, apologist candy asses who lack the will and confidence to defend our civilization from threats- or we'd have already capitulated cravenly like Norway did recently (if the story is no longer on his main page, there are links at the bottom for previous posts).

-1 Troll? -1 Flamebait? Sure, why not- but we're not talking about civil liberties here, we're talking about monitoring the communications of people who want to kill us, and their agents in our country. The fact that so many don't realize this- or plainly deny it because of a visceral hate for the current administration- sickens me, and you have just read the result of that disgust.

To those who are worked up about this,
I question your seriousness about preserving our country.
I question your patriotism.
and most of all....
I question your judgement

Interesting Stacked deck on /. and leftist too

[ltmdweaver]

Amazing that the /. community has become so patently biased against technology and its uses. ;-)

Also amazing that /. folks seem to have failed to research all that has happened in the past (you know those who fail to learn from the past are destined to relive it). If you are wondering how long we have known that the US (and other governments) have been engaged in quite an impressive searching for needles in a haystack exercise??.

Has anybody checked???

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/6/6929/1.html
http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/echelon.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html

This information has been publicly available for more than a decade. I know for a fact I was reading about it on MOSAIC, the original browser, because I had some X screen captures of some of this same stuff from the early 1990's (yes pre Clinton). So, I would think it would be no surprise that we had the capability. So why all the "Ooooh evil big brother??" comments. Let alone blaming one administration 10-15 years later for deciding to use the capability.

Think about it geeksters. Now that a group of governments have cooperatively the capability to get ~90% all of communications on the earth, capture them, statistically analyze them, and escalate on some heuristic rule based basis to a human most of the electronic communications on the face of the earth, what does this cooperative do? They honestly wouldn't be able to avoid having the phone numbers on both ends, they in the case of modern cell technology even have the location on cells, certainly ANI info, certainly country codes, area codes, billing information, etc. They would also have a nicely digitized voice record of the conversation. And I would hazard could decode this speech > text and then keyword search the voice call to some reasonable degree of accuracy. The idea that they could do this for hundreds of languages, dialects, and accents, and even have some ability for voice printing is pretty no brainer. And further, I hope none of you believe that there are enough humans to work this without some massive filtering done totally automated.

Now, how do I determine the ruleset to abide by the law, in whose country (since it is a cooperative), and on what basis do I determine the relevance of the statistics used? How do I train my operators (the eavesdroppers) to ignore what calls (when a particular message is escalated) despite that parameters of it's content may have far exceeded some notional statistical threshhold for further examination of its content?

Is it the idea that they might listen to your conversations with a paramour the offensive part? Is the offensive part really that you may be reaching some other threshold? Is the offensive part that some of the posters might have some other guilt thing going on? Do those of you out there believe that FISA, or for that matter posse comatatis really means that National Technical Means cannot be used to find you to zero in on your potentially questionable behavior in some other way? Only the worst national security issues are ever going through FISA anyhow. Anything found by ECHELON of less serious character (but still reaching some threshhold) is most certainly, very quietly, and with multiple levels of indirection (never traceable back to ECHELON, it's called plausible deniability in the black world) passed to law enforcement as an anonymous tip from which to start an investigation (never as evidence). The thought that somehow you are safe from this kind of stuff is the worst kind of self denial. Members of congress found otherwise, and tried to protect themselves, NOT US, from faceless bureaucrats like J.