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The NSA Knows Who You've Called
Jamie adds: Traditionally, the devices which record dialed phone numbers are called pen registers, and trap-and-trace devices. The ECPA provided some legal privacy protection. It was controversial when Section 214 of the Patriot Act amended 50 USC 1842 to allow the FBI to record this information with minimal oversight. The Department of Justice has been required for some time to report to Congress the number of pen registers and trap-and-traces, though in recent years [PDF, see question 10] it declared that information classified.
If anyone has information about how the NSA, as opposed to the FBI, has been involved in domestic phone number collection, please post links in the discussion.
In related news, the National Security Agency has closed down an inquiry into the so-called "Terrorist Surveillance Program," a separate program from this one, by refusing to grant security clearance to the lawyers in the Department of Justice. The NSA and the DoJ are both established under the executive.
I for one suggest NSA take aim at Qwest and bomb them back to to the PSTN-age!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
What an awesome tool for a government agency to have!
... you approach an airport terminal and hand them your ID card (or scan your arm) but you can't board the plane because you've been making too many phone calls to your friends who happen to have a rap sheet. </tinhat>
You know what I love? Scenarios! How about this one: You're arrested as a suspect for a crime you didn't commit. The government doesn't have anything on you except that there are no other suspects or witnesses. What they do have, is a network of vertices (phones) and edges (calls) spanning the past year of your life. They also have a list of "dirty" nodes or telephone users who have a rap sheet or ties to anti-American groups.
Thanks to Dijkstra's & the Bellman-Ford algorithms, it's a hop skip and a jump to a prosecutor saying "we have records showing you called your mother on such and such date prompting her to call her hair dresser who has been forwarding money to his family living in Mexico that has ties to Islamic Extremist groups!"
Farfetched? Maybe. But you don't have to be a Sci-Fi author to imagine crazy abuses of this data.
In the eyes of the government, we are all innocent until proven guilty. This could easily be turned into a data mining tool making some of us "less innocent" than others. And frankly, I'm not looking forward to that day.
<tinhat> Imagine a time and place where you have a security rating
My work here is dung.
here I come! Down you filthy Verizon, AT&T (aka SBC) and BellSouth dogs!
America sucks. It didn't use to. But it sucks now.
Land of the free my ass. I want the word free taken off all anthems, pledges, etc. It is pure propaganda now.
Thank goodness the UK isn't planning anything like that. I'd feel uneasy even making short personal, and innocent crime-free calls if they were logging every number I ever spoke to.
So many questions, but me no longer wonders how those biggie telco mergers got past regulators anymore...
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I'm sure they're just testing the Six Degrees of Separation hypothesis.
Seriously, though, how long until they use this information for the "War on Drugs?" Hunting down anyone who ever spoke on the phone with a drug dealer? Oh, wait... someone's pounding on my door right now.
Knowing that taxpayer money is being used to index the fact that I call:
- My mom
- Your mom
- Papa John's
No really, this is great.
...I can see it now, "Mr. Racebit, it appears to county officials that you make extremely frequent calls to your grandmother. As a counter-measure to terrorism, we will have to limit the amount of outgoing calls to her number for the safety & well-being of the community."
how embarrasing
is there any american who is proud of the way their country treats its citizens anymore? I'm from the UK where we are pretty fierce about our privacy - well I certainly am - and I simply can't understand how this can happen.
really, it's time to immigrate people. or perhap do something, depends how far up americas ass it's finger is.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
Call twenty or more random numbers a day.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Actually Bin Laden came that close to being snuffed by the NSA, since they have tapes of him talking to his mother by sat-phone, while he was in Afghanistan and she was in Saudi Arabia. This is why Clinton bombed Afghanistan and Sudan using long-range cruise missiles. They missed him, too, by a few minutes, unfortunately.
Of course, last I heard, he only used trusted human couriers to deliver messages. He may be a madman, but he is a smart madman. And most of these couriers were not American, but Pakistani and Saudi citizens, and they try to be as discreet -- and "un-islamist" as possible. So the NSA domestic spying program is definitely not useful against terrorists. But remember, kids, if we can't listen to your phone, the terrorists have won!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Anyone who didn't see this one coming hasn't been paying attention. When Risen at the NYTimes revealed the 'turrst surveillance program' (to give it its Orwellian name) every single indication was that this was the tip of the iceberg, from Abu Gonzalez' evasive testimony to Congress (specifically all the overly definitive "this program" statements) to the fact that TIA never really went away, it just moved from DARPA to Fort Meade. Add in the recent testimony of that AT&T employee about the NSA tap room in SF, well, duhh. Still to come - every single international call is monitored, to match voice patterns. Keyword analysis is (AFAIK) still a black art but identifying the recipients through voicewaves is old hat. So when Mr Bush says "we want to know who's talking to terrorists" he means it literally, and after the fact, not before. Of course, the NSA measure computing power not in flops, or MIPs, but in acres, so it's anyone's guess what the corporations turned around and agreed to after 9/11. FISA would never have covered this wholesale data mining, congress would never have authorised it, so we're back to that old chestnut, "we're at war" Of course I live in the UK, where we have no expectation of privacy and the fact that GCHQ is routinely spying on every single one of us goes uninvestigated and unremarked. In some ways the US is ahead of us on this. Why don't the democrats propose a constitutional right to privacy? How would the GOP argue against privacy from government? Their voters heads would explode... federal government..
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
"The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear.""
Just think of how many politicians, government officials (foreign and domestic) and captains of industry (ditto) will be caught in this net. Even if we don't catch terrorists the blackmail potential will be priceless.
What about VoIP? Or are they still secret about this one?
With all that data, imagine the patterns waiting to be discovered and how much can it (the data) tell about society...
0.00001% of Slashdotters actually get phone calls not involving work
It might (just might) make telemarketers think twice 'bout cold calling. After all, they COULD phone some terrorist...
Seriously now. COULD it help? Yes. WILL it help? Most likely not. Ever tried to find the needle in a haystick? At best, it can give a clue to a terrorist's buddies AFTER the crime has been commited. But, since they're not dumb either, they'll be gone by that time.
So, at best, it is a tool for snooping at the population.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Currently it's a simple message saying I'm not available and to leave a message. Now I'll have to add:
Be aware that the National Security Agency may be recording this call and anything you say may be used against you. I have no control over this situation as my phone provider is turning over this information on all its customers to the NSA.
Can't wait to hear the questions about this when people start calling.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
My neighbor has head-in-sand mentality. He believes that (a) since he doesn't commit crimes, the gov't will not surveil him, and (b) since he doesn't commit crimes, even if they do surveil him he doesn't care, and (c) if he ever does commit a crime, then the gov't can surveil him, with or without a warrant, since he deserves it. Now that the gov't has collected his phone records without a warrant (we live in BellSouth territory), I wonder if it will change his mind?
drink beer, and let the water run the mill
For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made -- across town or across the country -- to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.
And later on...
Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
The telcos stand to make out like gangbusters: a) they ingratiate themselves to the military and the government, which will come in handy to defeat Net Neutrality legislation, b) they can sit there and claim plausible deniability when someone brings suit against them because their phone records were used against them in court wrogfully, as they claim they're not supplying personal information to the NSA and c) the NSA, by running these algorithms and tracing calling patterns is generating data that could potentially be used by them to modify call routing schemes, change marketing penetration, and generally give them access to potentially useful information, which I'm sure the NSA will be only too happy to provide, to gain further cooperation.
Seems as if the telcos are now firmly in bed with the government and will pretty soon be able to write their own ticket to profits on the backs of taxpayers. Are all these illegal immigrants sure they want to be in this country?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Let's get this bitch broken open and leaked all over. Then we'll see how long the program remains under the guise of "we're only looking for terrorists".
Dump the thing, and datamine the fuck out of it. I would love to not only be able to harass the guy who misdialed my number at three in the morning, but everyone he called in that month, then explain to them, Oh, it's your drunk friends fault, and the NSA's.
Why do they do it? because they can and because they believe it may be useful - easy to create a database with easily obtainable data with information that they believe may be useful - I don't think there's a master plan to it - it's more like, "let's do it cos we can". And when they give themselves a reason of NATIONAL SECURITY they make it very hard to argue against. If they honestly believe it may be useful of course they're going to do it, especially when it's in the name of "National Security".
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
So everyone here is going to complain about this. A few people will post links to email your congressman. A few less will troll by using the "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" excuse.
Let us hope to our respective dieties that the Democrats gain control of at least 1 house of Congress in 2007. Perhaps, in a long shot, they might put an end to these blatantly unconstitutional programs. Then again, I don't trust them to do that too much.
Perhaps it is time for Americans of all stripes (liberals, conservatives, socialists, libertarians, anarchists, etc.) to invoke the rebellion clause of the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps it is past time for the tree of liberty to be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
If you're not ready to be shipped to Gitmo, at the very least ask your state representative(s) to call for a constitutional convention. If 38 states call for one, we can try to get back on the right track to liberty and a government more respectful of those liberties.
When ET phones home, we can finally have definitive proof of alien presence here on earth!
...who you gonna call?
Terror, terrorists, terror!!
9/11, terrorists, 9/11, terror!!
Think of the children! 9/11!!
Feel better now?
This database might also be useful for trying to track down those pesky leakers. For example, a search could be done for all phone numbers that have called Dana Priest of the Washington Post or Jim Risen of the New York Times. According to independent journalist Wayne Madsen (himself a former NSA employee), the NSA has targeted journalists in a codeword project formerly called Firstfruits.
George W. Maschke
AntiPolygraph.org
they hate us because of our freedoms!
There was no reason to change the title; the previous one was more informative, and a lot less flamebaitish.
I've read two books on the history of the NSA and generally follow happenings in the intelligence community... So when I say I'm confused, hopefully it'll be on a higher level.
Isn't the NSA prohibited, by its charter, from doing this? And not in a way that's open to interpretation, but in a pretty hard and fast way? IIRC, I recall times the NSA had to dump captured communication traffic because one of the sides was an American in the US.
Can someone help me here?
Ack!
If a few million people call the operator in a one-day period to ask how to buy an Iranian nuclear bomb, that should light up the NSA like a Christmas tree. I wouldn't be surprised if they went running to Congress to have their budget doubled after proving a "massive Iranian conspiracy" to smuggle a N-bomb into the USA.
One of the great things about the public education system is that it doesn't teach a critical understanding of historical events. Take police states for example. Most people in the US think they're built in a day and that a police state only exists when thugs in snazzy uniforms goosestep down the street. They not only don't know, but don't even want to know what leads up to the formation of a police state.
You know what does? People railing against one socio-political-economic class as the root problem of society. Newsflash, most classes are where they are for reasons they could have helped or legitimately earned. A pluralist society needs that class diversity to reinforce individualism. And let's not forget perceived enemies of all types. Then there's the "just give up part of your liberty and you'll be safe, if you've got nothing to hide of course." It's like gun control. There are a lot of cops out there who can't shoot worth a damn and police departments are legendary for resistance to change. Do you trust them with your daily safety? I don't.
When people say to you "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," you can respond (which I usually do) with "no decent, civilized person would ever have grounds to criticize the basic checks and balances that you oppose."
So, how many Americans would suddenly become "suspected terrorists"?
In related news, the National Security Agency has closed down an inquiry into the so-called "Terrorist Surveillance Program," a separate program from this one, by refusing to grant security clearance to the lawyers in the Department of Justice. The NSA and the DoJ are both established under the executive.
In effect, the fox prosecutor shut down the investigation into whether or not the foxes committed a crime when they broke into the henhouse, saying that the fox prosecutor was not allowed to enter the fox den to look for feathers or chicken bits. But of course, no crimes were committed, the chickens probably just flew off. Honestly.
And on a side note, it appears that Qworst has finally FINALLY done something that doesn't piss me the hell off.
For everyone who doesn't see a problem with this, remember that you're only safe if every person working for the NSA with access to this information is a perfect person with no chance of ever using their information for illegal purposes. Wonder how long it will be before NSA sells its list to a marketing company. Or someone at the NSA sells the list to a marketing company.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
Good News! This data probably isn't admissible in court.
Bad News! No court is involved in extrodinary redition. Enjoy the drugs and plane ride!
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Dear Osama,
please can you start using the telephone more often? We're having real trouble finding where you are! It would help if you phoned one of your relatives, spoke loudly and clearly into the phone, and if you can say a few of our keywords that would be great.
Thanks!
The NSA
.... as they likely know about my 1-900 phone sex habit.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Repeat after me: The terrorist threat is minimal.
In the last ten years, smoking has killed 4 million Americans. Traffic has killed 400.000. Terrorism has killed 4.000. When will you stop handing total power to the government just to fight this one, close to irrelevant risk? And why not spend those many billions on the healthcare system and traffic safety?
Make sure you tell a friend about the article.
Thanks to Dijkstra's [wikipedia.org] & the Bellman-Ford [wikipedia.org] algorithms, it's a hop skip and a jump to a prosecutor saying "we have records showing you called your mother on such and such date prompting her to call her hair dresser who has been forwarding money to his family living in Mexico that has ties to Islamic Extremist groups!"
Impressive name dropping. Too bad you don't know what you are talking about. The NSA does not use minimal path algorithms to search for records. The phone company switching equipment might have used them to construct the original call circuit.
In the eyes of the government, we are all innocent until proven guilty.
The desire of the vast majority of Americans to root out terror in the US has given the government the mandate to use communication records. The nefarious behavior of the government goes only as far as that mandate. If you want to rail against someone for the loss of privacy, rail against the great silent majority in America who will not tolerate a repeat of 911.
an ill wind that blows no good
Random won't cut it because people keep calling their cell leader, dope dealer etc. Nodes are nodes.
Better use VoIP through some kind of anonymous proxy.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I think you don't appreciate how clever this really is. Once the terrorists are no longer jealous of your freedom, they will lose interest and leave you alone. All the NSA has to do is remove all of your freedoms and the problem is solved.
Don't put off until tomorrow what you can leave until the day after.
Supposedly the information doesn't actually contain things like people's names, or at least is not usable in that way without getting more information, probably by getting a warrant or asking the phone companies for more information about a specific user. This would most likely be useful to have a ready-to-go database (pile of evidence) that could not only link terror suspects to their record communictaions once they have been found, but to also bring in new leads connected to the suspect.
Step 1) Put the technological infrastructure in place
Step 2) Place your political friends and allies in charge of the infrastructure
Step 3) Reduce measures to control abuse of they system by claiming it's in the interests of "national security"
Step 4) Undermine the efforts of your political enemies with your newfound power
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
That's easy. They'll just expand the definition of "terrorist" like they've been doing the past 5 years until it is useful to them.
Now, you know, it is completely your fault. If you would have simply done like your good neighbors and *voluntarily* installed the Homeland Protection (tm) device in your house, we could have reviewed your conversation with your mother to determine your innocence. But, alas, you didn't want this invasion of privacy since you're most likely a leftist terrorist cell leader [1].
Good luck and thanks for all the fish.
[1] we have lots of techniques in far off places that
can be used to extract your confession
Never did I think I'd actually be glad to be a Qwest customer. I mean, after all the rolling over that Qwest has done, all the anti-customer behavior, I'm surprised they took the moral high ground.
Oh, wait. They didn't, they were just afraid they'd get sued.
Where do they (and the new local spinoff, Embarq) sit in all of this?
Way to go USA Today. Way to be comprehensive in your reporting.
"a database of every call ever made inside the USA" ... "has been secretly collecting phone call records of tens of millions of Americans"
Man, there are waaaay more than 10 million Americans... but I guess they probably have no reason to record the calls of the Religious Right or people watching Fox News... since they are good little toadies... so that probably cuts it down to size...
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
Do you Americans need a more obvious signal?? How fucking stupid are you!? You sit on your ass doing nothing while you lose every freedom you have- you wont ever notice they're all gone! not even when you're in some slave labour camp!! you all believe what they tell you! No wonder the rest of the world sees Americans as ignorant.
Now is the time to use that 2nd ammendment you are so proud of!
Or would you prefer to wait until you're all handcuffed to each other on a chain-gang?
does this include t-mobile and cellular-only companies?
-- lol pwned
"Isn't the NSA prohibited, by its charter, from doing this?"
Congress' "authorization for the use of force" repeals all sorts of things. Haven't you been paying attention to the news?
It only costs a few buildings, over 3,000 lives but man oh man look at all the great stuff you can do now. You can run roughshod over civil rights and the population will let you do it!
Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, OMG TERRORISM!!!!!!!!!!!
Keep your population on edge with a color coded system so they won't question anything. Oh need to raise the level..Is your bathroom breeding terrorists?
Terrorism is the new Communism(tm)
Everyone is making comments about what if they called someone who called someone. With this system, if they want to get a warrent for you, they just have to have someone with the same name as someone on the "no fly list" to call you at 2:00 am every morning for a couple of days. You can control who you call, but you can't control who calls you.
Unclear to whom? It's plenty clear to me: you nab a terrorist suspect, find out who he or she called and follow up with further inquiries.
Not to say that this usefulness justifies the massive invasion of privacy that goes along with it, but just because the technology is "bad", doesn't mean it's useless.
Does anybody know anything about these programs?
-- the Defense Intelligence Agency's Human Factors Analysis Center
-- the National Security Agency's Electronic Space Analysis Center
-- the "Global Harvest" office of the military's Joint Information Operations Center (San Antonio, Tex.)
-- the U.S. Strategic Command's "Night Fist Evaluation Cell"
They seem to be engaged in similar tasks as well.
The surveillance is much more pervasive then anybody would lead us to believe. It's just a matter of time before we have scores of "enemy combatants" going to camps in Nevada (built and run by Halliburton, of course)
F*** you all, sniffers, spies, and whatnots! Encrypted VoIP with dyndns in a true P2P manner (no central call recording). Here we go. And in case you want still find a way. I would love to make a script to make random calls to everyone just fill up that stupid database.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Get with the program!
Why should I be shocked that a spy agency knows who I called?
Anyone can go on the internet and within a few hours and some heavy change get the phone records of anybody else.
Even spy and law enforcement agencies were using these shady services.
And how does that work? Expensive backbone wiretaps? Nope, it's just a bit of social engineering done by the PI. Or its an inside man with a entry level customer service job that has access to these phone records. on demand It all comes down to phone company security being pathetically weak.
All those who quite never have personal phone call will be suspected of trying to evade the monitoring.
Permission to use that line verbatim in my own voice mail message and/or email signature?
I wonder if this system catches redirects and spoof sources. If it does, would it be possible to either spoof a known bad source, or redirect them to a known bad source?
It'd be really annoying if someone calls me during dinner, I'm short with them on their sales technique, start to mention putting me on a do-not-call list, and suddenly I'm talking to someone with an unknown language. I hang up, and the phone rings again - it's the same unkown language. Two days later, it happens again. Suddenly in this scenario, I'm worried about picking up the phone.
Opens up the door to scams, pranks, blackmail, etc. Not to mention a glut of demands for investigations into the legal, security and enforcement systems. Even without the capability to redirect/spoof, the public misunderstandings about such a system will lead to a lot of paranoia and chaos if people.
A horrible change for our nation and the actual security of the nation. Default survailance should not be the role of the government, unless there really is a default state of emergency existing beforehand, and never in civilian situations.
Ryan Fenton
If you are in technology, I think you long ago realized that the government- or other parties- is most probably monitoring your email, your phone records, your bank accounts, your snail mail, and any other data item they can get their hands on.
Either encrypt your information or have no expectation of privacy.
I mean, why not? If they're listening in to all of my calls, why shouldn't they pay for them as well? Especially since most of my calls are $4.99 per minute and involve a hot college co-ed named Allison... The bills can get pretty steep. Perhaps it's the NSA I'm hearing breathing heavily on my line...
$ touch
are belong to us!
Sick of stupidity? http://www.patentlystupid.com
You joke, but I seriously do recommend a lot of people do this. A lot of bad things happen because they fly below people's radar (kind of hard to watch the government 24/7 and have a life). In fact put the message everywere. e.g. personal web pages, bumper sticker, ads in paper. People need to turn their voices UP, not down, while they still have voices.
Since the take-over of the country by the NSA, the 'new' USSR is tabulating the campaign to limit internal movement by requiring documents to be provided for all internal travel by air... So far, millions of former Americans have had dangerous weapons such as children's scizzors, combs, wine bottle openers and nail clippers confiscated. With positive results like this, further limits to dangerous citizens are being considered.
Any questions about the NSA result in being immediately put on a secret list.
Any attempts to travel by people on the list are met with full body searches and hard X-raying of dangerous photographic films of family events such as birthdays and anniversaries.
The war on terror continues...
*** Don't be dull.***
Pattern matching in large graphs is HARD. This is not Dijikstra's algorithm, it's much, much worse. Some subsets of pattern matching are actually NP-complete, so you have to resort to statistics and fuzzy methods.
However... what makes pattern matching RADICALLY simpler (quadratic worst-case complexity, n*log(n) average case where n is number of people) is addition of a tiny smidgen of semantic data. Such as KEYWORDS and Voice Patterns. This extra information simply helps you prune the dataset and throw away candidate matches quicker.
So, if we take *only* keywords or voice-prints, we have very noisy results with little correlation to the real world. If we only take call records, we get a huge graph that is near-impossible to search. However... if we take BOTH, we get a dramatic increase in performance and drop in number of errors.
Speaking of false positives... NSA doesn't like them any more then you do - it costs them a lot of resources to check something out.
It's far more likely that the NSA has always had this information, but that someone "inside" was about to spill the beans. Someone inside, for example, that wanted to derail the chances for the former NSA chief to become the head of the CIA?
Nothing to see here. Just dirty laundry being aired to fill someone's political sails and deflate someone else's.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
The restrictions you speak of are on a company's ability to arbitrarily FIRE YOU.
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
really, it's time to immigrate people.
I assume you mean emmigrate, correct? If so, yes! Please do! All of you who hate the fact that your country's goverment is performing its first and foremost duty to protect its citizenry please drop what you're doing and move to China/Iran/North Korea immediately. If you feel this is too "flame-bait" due to my selection of countries please refer to the post above talking about the UK (video surveilance), Germany (restrictions on speach regarding WWII and race matters), or France (also has speach restrictions as well as exciting labor laws/riots).
Yes, I'm proud of my country (even though that won't win me any friends on America-hating slashdot).
I'm not very brushed up on how VoIP is switched. Will these calls be recordable too? Presumably, if the call connects to someone on POTS then it could be.
Anyone know?
The recent series of posts on freedom to tinker should get very, very interesting in light of this new information, since he elluded to this (biggest database ever) in the first post in this series.
Seriously though, the government's right to build databases is constitutionally protected, does not have any statute of limitations placed on it, and must not be infringed upon!
Once again, what part of, you cannot impeach a king, do you people not get?
The government will want to make an example of them so next time everyone will obey.
Then next time quest asks permission for something...DENIED!!
Or the IRS will audit the heck out of them
...Kevin Bacon?
I knew there was a reason that this whole NSA/Phone thing would turn out to be useful to the common man.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The whole bitching over this thing is trivial.
If you really think your phone conversations are 'secure' then you are saddly mistaken. Telecommunications corps. are like giant black holes for information.
Put on a yellow vest and you can walk right in and request any information you want. Yes, Terriost, or 15 year old kids can do the same dam thing.
As the UK posters, Why would your government tell you about a secret database of phone calls? I am sure in the UK the inteligence community has a little tigher grasp on the media, you know with their ability to locate all of the vechicles at any given moment.
These are not new ideas. What is 'new' is they are being half-assed reported. Reporters are scrambling for a story so quickly that they do not A) check facts and/or B) care about what their stories say. With the invent of cable news, has also come 23.5 hours of worthless topics and rehashing cspan.
If it is a secret government spying ring, I seriously think we should leave it up to the gentlemen with the PHD in pych. who has worked his way up to his position.
If and when it is used illegaly, then there should be action from the justices. Not congress.
"Santa Claus is coming to town" was really about the NSA?
He sees you when you're sleeping.
He knows when you're awake.
He knows if you've been bad or good,
You don't have to be anti-gun control to be anti-police state. To wit - if there was a sufficient amount of gun control then the state would not need to carry lethal weapons - they could get away with stun guns or even less. In such a case the police have *less* power.
The only people who would need access to high-powwered armaments should be the military. And since the military should be forbidden to intervene in domestic matters, it should prevent the creation of a police state.
Personal freedoms shouldn't have to be won by the barrel of a gun. They should be able to be given freely.
Then again - I am a dreamer. Perhaps if the general populace would stop electing warmongers to lead nations we wouldn't have so much of a problem.
Ya, you sure have to wonder of there were a couple of insiders who knew and just "let it happen" for the "greater good"(the ability to control the population better).
It's not like they were not told to track some of those people before 9/11.
The Bushes are dancing above your heads.
where are your liberty? Day after day I only see a more and more repressive state.
This is going worst than the communist U.R.S.S.
Not so long we'll call Stalin a Friendly Leader and some actual adminstration not so Friendly to your own entire people.
I think it's time to Slashdot these companies.
6
If you have Verizon, MCI, AT&T, SBC, or BellSouth for local phone service or long distance, DIAL 0 and complain to the operator.
If you have Cingular, AT&T, or Verizon for cell phone service, DIAL 611 and get a customer service rep on the line to complain to. REMIND THEM THEY ARE IN VIOLATION OF THEIR AGREEMENT WITH YOU, AND THAT YOU CAN SWITCH TO ANOTHER PROVIDER WITHOUT PENALTY.
More info here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/11/91046/796
NSA will post this entire database on an unencrypted, no password server somewhere, and some guy in the U.K., probably some computer nerd who hangs out at Slashdot and reads 2600 magazine, will accidentally stumble on to the database... then be called to be extradited to the U.S., but without actually entering the U.S. since that might require a real court - instead en route to the U.S. he'll be automatically placed in Guantunamo for the rest of his known life where he'll be chained to a computer in a secret underground labrinth working as an unpaid slave for the NSA.
Certainly not by conventional phone. I wonder if Iridium surrenders their records? What about emails to webmail accounts that are sent and accessed by computers behind anonymizers? Would these work, and/or what else would?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
A dystopia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia (alternatively, cacotopia[1], kakotopia or anti-utopia) is a fictional society that is usually seen as the antithesis of an utopia. A dystopia is usually characterized by an authoritarian or totalitarian form of government, or some other kind of oppressive social control.
If ever there was a 1984-like item in the news, this is it. Give to the ACLU and to EFF. Write to your congressman, boycott the phone companies. This is completely intolerable.
Talking about the color-coded system, I haven't heard anything about that recently. Is that still in use?
Jeez ... the parent was 500000% obvious in what he meant.
... and then proceeds to find yet more ways to reduce our freedoms. This isn't party-political though. All our politicians are equally useless and supportive of the trend to a police state.
Let me spell it out in words of one syllable for those who are sarcastically disadvantaged:
The UK is currently leading the pack of developed nations in turning into a police state. If you don't know it, you've been in a coma for several years. Even if your only contact with the outside world is Slashdot, you would still know it, if you've been paying attention. If you can think of something that isn't currently being monitored, it's undoubtedly being planned.
Why? Who the fuck knows why, but every time that Bush comes over for a natter with our PM, Blair bends over and cries for more
It's got to the point where we look at war movies and find nothing odd about citizens being asked for papers every couple of steps. But at least they could fake papers then, whereas here nobody asks us, they just do everything electronically.
Cripes guys, stay awake and on the ball. What's happening to us in the UK today will happen to you tomorrow.
Bingo, give the man a cigar for getting it right!
I lost my sig...
Israel already has such a database via AmDocs, the company that handles the billing for most US phone companies. In 1999 the NSA warned in a TS/SCI report that Israel had all this information and that this data could be leaked to the Israeli mob.
It's been known for a while that the NSA hires Santa Claus on the tough jobs because he's decades ahead really. How old is that rhyme do you think?
"The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear."
That's funny, most people here seem to think the NSA will find it very useful for establishing a "police state" and destroying our personal liberties. However, terrorists will be magically immune to the liberty-eroding powers of the NSA.
Clearly most slashdotters do not watch Law and Order.
"Repeat after me: The terrorist threat is minimal. "
You forgot the cost of the entire Twin towers complex.* The cost of the Edward R. Morrow building. Three planes. Part of the Pentagon. In other words Terrorists don't just kill people. Doesn't make what the government's doing OK, but does show that terrorism isn't just a "how many people died" game.
*That doesn't include the effect that 9/11 had on an already tettering economy.
Article the sixth [Amendment IV]
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Defendants most definitely have a right to compel exculpatory witnesses. Especially govt witnesses, including the NSA (who will blather NatSec). In fact, a sharp defense attorney may now appeal past convictions in light of this newly discovered evidence potential.
Did you know the former MCI is the 10th largest Defense contractor in terms of money received from the Pentagon? Now Verizon has that crown.
and via whatever metric of "person who talked to enough bad persons" you get a citizen score, the aim of the game is to get the folks with the highest citizen scores and give them the the prize of the game, the "Presumption of Anti" and if he's very lucky the "application of arbitrary sanction", there'll be enough of these prizes for almost(*) everyone.
You can also lower your score by "finding" secret items in other players closets, a spot gold farming could even be financially lucrative just like other rpgs.
Obviously people will want to have a citizen score as close to 0 as they can get, but to be honest, you don't want to have a score of 0 either, that wouldn't be wise, no citizen wants to be zero'ed.
*Remember, that some people are beyond reproach and are exempt from the game, after all they are bound by their own standards of honour and are beyond nefarious behaviour, they are way beyond mere nefarious behaviour.
Things are starting to look more and more like 1984!!
It's suppose to be funny, but it's true.
I for one bow down to our phone tapping overlords!
This NSA story always gets me going in the morning...
Dear Qwest;
I recently signed up for your local phone service. I haven't been using it very much, and was considering dropping it. But because I read today that you're standing up for my rights (even at the cost of government jobs), I've suddenly decided, without hesitation, to keep the phone service.
In addition, my business will soon be doing complete overhaul of their phone system, as well as their internet setup. I have a bid from the local qwest office on the project. I think I'll go with them.
Thanks!
---
Dear 2600/EFF/ACLU;
Wouldn't it an interesting to have one of your guys go overseas, to say, France (republicans still hate the French) and call the US a bunch. Don't say anything weird. Just make a bunch of calls at odd times (completely random), for very short to very long lengths (again, random). And then start to make a bunch of calls every 15 minutes, exactly 15 minutes apart. Then call New York or DC or something like that (from France). Then call the same number from your US number. Just be sure to do something that would get flagged by George's precious little algorithm.
Then?
Watch the NSA/CIA/FBI/DEA show up at your door.
Proceed to Supreme Court doorstep and hold a vigil until this gets ruled unconstitutional, which shouldn't take very long (only 4 to 10 years).
Thank you!
---
Dear Verizon;
Why do I pay you $50 a month to tell George Bush that I'm talking to my parents every Sunday night? Or that I order pizza at 1:00 am often enough? Because Bush now knows that I've called planned parenthood, does that mean my federal student loans are in jeopardy, just like all those people in Africa who can't even talk about condoms?
Fuck you.
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it...
Then your politicians can say with a straight face - your government does not spy on you.
If you are of interest in the UK
A US base will do the real fun spying for the UK government.
Then UK politicians can say with a straight face - your government does not spy on you.
If you are of interest - Australia, Canada, England and New Zealand have you in the dictionary 24/7. Phone, fax, email any part of the world and they will know.
What is new?
More funding and a post Church Committee generation to young or dumb to understand the assassinating people parts
or how to add up counts of perjury.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Go for it. In fact, anyone who wants to use what I wrote is free to do so. The more the merrier.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I for one have been welcoming our CIA overlords since 1961!
To wit - if there was a sufficient amount of gun control then the state would not need to carry lethal weapons - they could get away with stun guns or even less. In such a case the police have *less* power.
That is the funniest comment in the history of slashdot.
This reminds me of an old small bit from George Carlin: "I had a friend who knew his phone was being tapped, so he always answered 'F*** Hoover...'" Great stuff.
It's always nice to think there is some benevolent fascist organization that is all powerful and somehow miraculously only targets the real bad guys.
I've always thought the CIA was a front organization for such a real organization-- surely no real intelligence agency could be that incompetant.
Unfortunately, without any known exception*, such powers always get turned against the people and the current politicians enemies. Likewise many only mildly illegal acts get defined as "real" bad things.
*Of course if there was such an agency, we wouldn't know about its doings since it would be so secret.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Plane Hijackings, murders etc have all been going on for a while. One has to wonder why immediately after the fall of the USSR did Terrorism become the clear n present danger we all 'know' it o be :)
Can anyone suggest a sane county to emmigrate to? Good economy, decent climate, and NOT a police state? I'd like to start learning the language before the point of no escape.
Well what if a person commits a minor crime and the NSA picks up on it over tapped lines? or someone brags about stealing some crappy new game? The NSA then hands that info over to the local authorities, etc, etc.
As happy as they may make some people that sort of law enforcement encroaches on your constitutional rights.
You are to be innocent until proven guilty, no matter if someone thinks you are guilty or even you are guilty. The government HAS to prove you are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt it seems to me people don't understand the part about doubt you have to prove past that. If a juror has a doubt, then by conscience that juror should be voting not guilty. Too many times these days people vote guilty because they want revenge, justice, etc.
I'm not saying its right to steal, but when the Federal government starts to get involvled into state or local issues then there is something wrong in which our government is opperating. I suggest we all take a break, read our Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Then see if you like how things are.
I don't see the NSA handing info over to other agencies down the line too far fetched. Someone gets busted because evidence came against them from some cloaked agency and its undisputed. I mean I agree with arresting criminals, but do it legally following the legal process. IE: Cops do the leg work, the prosecutor goes to court, etc. It may seem like I'm griping for criminals, but what happens when they screw up and get you mixed up with someone totally different, like mentioned above?
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
Customers of AT&T, Verizon, and Bellsouth (and Cingular, which is AT&T/Bellsouth) need to sue the companies. They have violated regulations meant to protect the customers. If the companies willing to do this get hit heavily, they will be less willing to do it. The companies not fined and judged to the brink of collapse can then take market share from them, and we'll have more phones covered by companies unwilling to do this.
Great, now I'll have the NSA at my door, asking me why I haven't called my mother recently and making me feel bad...
Seriously. I live deep in the South, and most of my friends are conservatives, though many are no longer supporters of Bush. 6 years of this Presidency has led to us basically tacitly refusing to speak about politics anymore, but they would not be phased by this for multiple reasons:
1) Some might deny that this is actually happening and chock it up as evidence of media bias.
2) Others will fall back on the canard of "if you're doing nothing wrong, then..."
3) Others will also believe that government is incompetent is every arena except policing and refuse to believe that individual employees will abuse things or that mistakes will be made.
4) Others will simply just ignore everything I say because "I'm just a Bush-hater."
Most will fall into #2 & #3. Only one guy I know would pull either #1 or #4. When Republicans govern, hardcore conservatives will refuse to believe that anything they do can ever be done wrong, especially when it concerns cracking down on crime and terrorism. Hell, just look at how many still blame everything that went wrong in Hurricane Katrina on local Democrats in Louisiana. If your neighbor has a "head in the sand" mentality, then no amount of reason will shake him until something is DONE to him by the government, which he is probably correct in assuming is extremely unlikely.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
On a related spooky note, the department of Immigration and Naturalization already tracks vehicles (via an automated photo matching system) driving both directions at their (highly unconstitutional) "checkpoints". On the way towards the border you drive through an array of cameras over the highway, on the way back you stop at the checkpoint. I'm not talking about crossing the border here...I'm talking about getting within 50 miles of it and getting searched just because you drove to the most southern part of this country.
The telephone company, at police request, installed at its central offices a pen register to record the numbers dialed from the telephone at petitioner's home. Prior to his robbery trial, petitioner moved to suppress "all fruits derived from" the pen register. The Maryland trial court denied this motion, holding that the warrantless installation of the pen register did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Petitioner was convicted, and the Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed.
Held:
The installation and use of the pen register was not a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and hence no warrant was required. Pp. 739-746.
SMITH v. MARYLAND
1. that i get telemarketing calls despite being on do not call list.
2. that i get telemarketing calls on my cell phone? ( for some reason i get spanish automated telemarketing calls out of some outfit in a cetain city in florida. basic reverse lookup can't seem to pinpoint more than that.)
Oh yeah, I forgot supposedly they only keep international calls on the list... Dang it... Well it was an idea...
You don't seem to realise the owners of the buildings damaged in the 9/11 attacks recieved more money, through certain deals performed just beforehand, than the cost of the damage itself. You are, however, correct in the tone of your post: it's costing the government (the organisation, not the people at the top of it) a hell of a lot to sort it out, and they don't see a pinch of the private profit that certain people made from 9/11.
A block of code, sufficiently well-written, is indistinguishable from magick.
You know, we live in a day and age where I would not be surprised if the NSA was found to be doing this, and even more shockingly was found to be within legal bounds as well.
I would also not be surprised if this was nothing more than a miss-inforation ploy. That's right. The NSA may not really be logging all those call times and numbers.
I don't think they have the data mining structure to process anything except for info on people they are watching. Besides, this info has always be stored. Don't be so naive, they can always just ask a judge for the call records... Heck just about anybody or agency can get this info.
now here me out, I am a huge fan of personal freedom and I stand in favor of every move for keeping our freedom, and in opposition of any attempt to take it from us, but lets be realistic here. This is nothing new, and if it was your job to be a spy agency for the us, you would not find it so intrusive.
That said, we do need to wake up as a nation to the reality that we are in a more and more policed state and we need to pay attention, in that our personal rights and freedoms are being chipped away at. But, we also need to see political propaganda for what it is. This is not a bone shattering discovery... This is just a drop in a very large bucket. A bucket that doesn't exist of course, but none the less a bucket.
Where in there does it say anything about phone calls?
It is now, and always has been, not what the amendments say, but how they are interpreted.
I guess that's an answer to my question....
Ack!
He's connecting the dots nicely.
The OP forgot the flu... 37K/year * 10 = almost 400k americans dead.
Ok, lets talk about more than just the cost in lives.
The cost can't be any greater than the loss of productivity in US workers due to not having a decent helath care system.
The cost can't be any greater than the increase in cost of gasoline to the US consumers and buisnesses due to US lead instability in oil producing countries in the middle east and the continued effort of the US to piss off oil producing countries outside the middle east.
We are bringing any increased cost upon ourselves and then spending hundreds of billions of dollars on top of that to comat it. That money could have been spent on real threats to our economy... pandemic flu.. when it hits is almost guaranteed to cause major disruption to our economy and since we have no nation health care will probably take an unfortunatly large amount of people since we have no way to force creation or stockpiling of necessary resources to combat such a threat.
I'm sick of blaming the US government (even though they appear to be evil incarnate). I'm going to start blaming the American people. Sort your f###ing arses out! No this is not going to be a mindless flame/trolling spree. I'm just venting/airing some thoughts.
Firstly I'm a UK cit. and have an US wife and child, so I'm not a Yank hater.
Here's the thing:
1) these "powers" that the US govt are acquiring at great pace, are of no use what so ever to them. As some posts have pointed out, in practice, there is little to no evidence to show they help stop terrorism. But a theoretical consideration can lead to the same conclusion. The commander in Chief can not make sense of this data (he doesn't seem to be able to tie his shoe laces unaided, but that's another story). The data sets are so vast, that even the analysis of them is so abstract, and so lost amongst so many other such forms of 'inteligence' that they serve no practical purpose, and will never be acted upon.
2)There are obvious civ liberty issues here, which have already been discussed to death.
3)As an English speaking software engineer, I could do business in/with the US. And due to my family ties, I could prob even become a US cit. pretty easily, but while the US govt keeps doing this kind of thing, I won't even make a phone call to your "Great" nation. So for the greatest bastion of capitalism, this kind of insane governance is really harming the US' trading. As I am fare from alone in thinking this way.
Now off topic :
4)For a government who proclaims to be the spreader of democracy around the globe, when was the last time you can remember them actually doing something the majority of citizens wanted?
5)The US govt is now forcing/persuading other govts (like the UK, but again, we are far from alone) to do things their electorate do not want to happen. This is spreading AntiDemocracy!
I'm happy to sacrifice the very little karma I have to say this. It needs to be said.
God bless the anti nationalists.
Because you can - or because you should?
This information can already be bought from telephone companies by anyone. The NSA asked for and recieved the information. They didn't demand it from the companies or force them to hand it over. QWest even refused to do so without a warrant and the others could have done the same.
This is a story more about companies handing out personal information then what the NSA is up to.
See:
AMERICAblog just bought General Wesley Clark's cell phone records for $89.95
Stupid things kids do.
You are in charge of gathering information to prevent catastrophic loss of life. Your enemies are operating within the borders of your own country. You are a GS-13 NSA analyst that probably graduated at the top of your class and could easily walk into a corporate job that would pay 3 times your current salary. Why do you think that analyst is there? To catch you talking to your pot dealer over the phone? To support the agenda of a narrow minded politician? To take away your civil liberties or freedom of speech? I don't think so. How about too make a positive impact on the world by gathering and protecting information to prevent terrorists from carrying out acts of violence and to stop hostile countries from threatening the security of the United States and its allies. Because that is what the NSA does! I agree that the government should not have unilateral power to surveil American citizens, or anyone for that matter. However, a tool like the database being discussed would be extremely valuable to the intelligence community. With appropriate oversight, such a system may prevent and probably already has helped prevent domestic acts of terrorism. Remember our elected officials still call the shots and make the rules. If politicians misuse the database then we as a society have a mechanism to remove them from office. It's called free elections. Everyone complaining about the NSA database voted in the last election right? Before you criticise the actions of our government, and I do feel that the current administration deserves criticism, remember that it is your government and you have the power to change it by speaking out and being politically active. Make your feelings known by writing to your congressmen and senators, and vote!!
Criminals use untraceable, disposable, throw away cell phones. They dispose of them long before their minutes run out, which is why in most major cities you can find them laying in the streets with minutes left on them. When this first hit the news every fuckin, Islamist in the country went out and bought a dozen disposable phone, for cash, from their Islamist friends who run every fuckin gas station in the united states. They also purchased AT&T calling cards that they make sure to never use at their residence so it can be traced back to them. This is just another jackbooted scheme to make honest citizens tow the Republican party line.
Obviously this information is going to be used to track down subversive elements and their accomplices.
Thus members of environmentalist organisations, members of anti-war movements, members of anti-globalization movements, anybody that was a whistle-blowers of an illegal behaviour by a big corporation, anybody that's neither a registered Republican nor a registered Democrat and anybody that ever downloaded an MP3 from a P2P network.
Anybody that believes that State Surveilance organizations exist (be it in a "democratic" state or not) to protected the citizens instead of what they actual do which is defended the status quo and the existing power structures (also known as "protecting stability") can e-mail me 'cause i can sell you the location of my secret gold mine in the middle of the Atlantic.
The NSA is part of the government. The government is supposed to follow things like "due process," and whatnot. Yes, this is a condemnation of the power of corporations, as well; the abuse of their position is rampant, and adds to the problem, but that does not make the NSA innocent.
If corporations were still maintained by charter, it would be time to consider revoking their charters; unfortunately, corporations have the same status as a person.
So we should put them on death row, instead.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Most people even think that voting for a third party is too risky. A sizable chunk of them can't be bothered to vote at all. And you're going to ask this lot to go up against the most powerful military force on Earth in defense of a liberty that they can't see or feel? The same voting public that consistently goes to the polls and votes to suppress other people's right to get legally married? They don't even know what liberty means.
Even if by some freak accident they won, what then? How would you go about making, from scratch, a system better than the one that's already in place? Consider the French Revolution. They spent years lopping off each other's heads, only to return to an Emperor. Yes, they eventually became a free republic, but I wonder if it was because of the Revolution, or the slow trickle down of new ideas about civil society.
If you want to change the world, revolution talk is a waste of time, as is any scheme that requires the unflinching support of a large base of people. Spread ideas instead. Teach people how to use free/open source software. Encourage people to read mind-expanding books.
Think sideways: Free software has done more just by existing than any tech lobbyist could do with a million dollars. The greatest forces for good in the Civil Rights era were (the atheist says reluctantly,) ordinary citizen-run Baptist churches. And of course, if there was a car that ran on something cheaper than gas, we would have had much fewer wars, fewer enemies in the middle-east, and therefore less excuse for security measures like this one.
There are plenty of opportunites to promote a free and open society that can be exploited without turning to politics. The dance of war and politics is like humanity armwrestling with itself. The real changes happen from the bottom up.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
The EFF has already filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T for aiding the government in this illegal activity, and the Bush administration has already used it's "powers" to begin the "cover-up."
The problem with your argument is that one of the first things that every proto-police state does is register firearms, or in some cases outright seize them. Not every country with gun control is a bonafide police state, but every police state has had major problems with letting the average citizen carry a weapon capable of posting any credible threat to its police.
In the 20th century, over 150,000,000 people were murdered by their governments or by foreign governments. I think the case for why governments cannot be trusted with a monopoly on the ability to use deadly force has been made very clearly by history.
Besides, without firearms, the only way you can disarm the state is moral persuasion, and that... well... doesn't have any past impact on politicians dedicated to gaining power. The only "non-violent resistance" movements that have worked were in countries where the government wasn't sufficiently committed to maintaining power that it couldn't stomach killing large numbers of people, or the government was being isolated by almost all foreign governments and was already internally weak.
IF (this is a BIG if) we give the administration a pass on ignoring the law while in a state of war. And IF (another BIG assumption) the "war on terror" is a war....
When is it over? If Bin Laden dies of complications of kidney failure? If in one day we capture the top 100 bad guys and stuff them in Git-Mo? 1000? 10,000?
We go a month without a casuality anywhere in the world by a terrorist action? Two months? A year? The end of GW's term? Jeb Bush's 8 year stint?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Other than "anonymous sources" who apparently feel it's very important to tell us about this - but not important enough to risk their jobs - is there any evidence that this story is true?
I mean - I'm not saying it *isn't* true, but we're basing a lot of outrage on something that's no more soundly based than any random internet posting.
Clear, Dark Skies
With skypes enomous effort in strong encryption of the "phone calls" and with its free binary only client, the NSA can't control me! :)
First, I am not a lawyer. (I'm a law student.)
As Jamie alludes to what we are probably dealing with is the NSA collecting pen-register information on everyone and everything it can get its hands on, apparently from Verison, ATT, and BellSouth. This is an enormous amount of information. Pen-register information is basically what number you are calling from and what number you are calling to, I believe. Prosecutors do not need a warrant generally or have any level of suspicion to collect a wide range of information including pen-register information, the address information on the envelope of all of your mail, bank, utility, credit card, and other spending records. This sounds a bit crazy (and I think it is), but the legal theory is that this is all information that a person has turned over to a third party (phone company, USPS, credit card company, bank etc) and because a person exposed this to a third party it is not protect by an expectation of privacy and thus the government does not need a warrrant and does not violate the 4th Amendment protection against searches and seizures by collection this non-private information.
In theory the NSA is just collecting information that prosecutors already can collect en mass. There may be some restrictions in federal statutes as to how much of this bulk collection the FBI or the NSA can do.
Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, OMG TERRORISM!!!!!!!!!!!
oh man, I read that like Ballmer's "developers, developers, developers, developers"
I have a sudden image in my head of Bush prancing around repeating endlessly:
Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism, Terrorism...
You call it "botching", but W calls it "leadering", or "decidering", or something. Sure it looks like Jeb screwed up the Florida presidential election of 2000. But did he? He helped secure the office for his brother. If I was W, I don't think I'd call that a failure.
I am not a crackpot.
If the government told them that it *was* legal wouldn't that push legal liability onto the government?
Clear, Dark Skies
True, indeed. They have that first call logged but their analysts claim it was a call from Sherlock Holmes to then IBM chief Thomas Watson....something Cheney wants to move on.
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
It's called THE OTHER CANDIDATE.
Goddamn, Satan himself would have been a better choice, and you think two progressives are somehow worse?
Go f$ck yourself and your military-industrial complex cabal.
Call your bribe-slimed senator now and demand the
arrest, trial, conviction, and sentencing of Al-Qaeda.
Have a Bush_Cheney_Rice_Rumsfeld_Hayden_free-day,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.
All phone companies are evil. Some are more evil than others. Qwest happened to be surperlative in being a bad phone company, but this one act of refusing to turn over info to the NSA raises my opinion of them. Still, if it comes to not having a phone or going with Qwest. I'd choose no phone.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
That is the number to which my cell phone is forwarded ... So the NSA thinks I have a pathological interest in the time.
Well, at least the companies aren't giving away the names and addresses of people with the phone records. This would require a warrant! The data is safely anonymous, so data mining is okay.
I'm sure no one at the NSA knows how to use the reverse lookup on superpages.com or any of those other sites...
Also, we receive only one side of the story: the one the US government sees fit for us to see. They conveniently forget to mention it was the CIA who trained him and his original followers to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the Reagan years. They also don't bother mentioning that we've spent an order of magnitude more money in Iraq than we have trying to find bin Laden.
Which one had something to do with 9/11 again?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Back in 7th grade, I remember reading this story. In essence, the story goes like this: Some aliens land in a town in which the people know each other quite well. The aliens proceed to make a few strange things happen. Eventually, accusations start flying everywhere, and the town essentially destroys itself. Think of those aliens as terrorists, and think of that town as America.
You see, this domestic spying program is a clear indicator that our politicians are living in fear. It is exactly what these terrorists want -- that we live in fear and eventually destroy themselves. 9/11 was the only thing they had to do... now they don't have to lift a finger except for those occasions when they want to taunt us.
Or some lacky with the morals of a political prostitute might decide to keep tabs on who their political opponents are calling on a regular basis. Or detail the grassroots network in a particular area and send their buddies in the FBI out to intimidate them.
I am sick and fucking tired of our government spending billions to spy on Americans instead of sending some steely-eyed mofo's out to whack terrorists in their own back yard. The Republicans are the most foul, corrupt, incompetent bunch that this country has ever seen in power. I'm disgusted.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's posts like yours that make me wish I had moderator points.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
I was thinking the same thing.
I'll run as many nodes as I can... like 1 atm.
We (nerd/paranoid commmunity) just need to get WiMax or Mesh WiFi systems in place and then we could dump the Traditional phone system.
If You wanna discuss this (practical implementation, etc) IM me on AIM... Simdude90015
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
Anybody know how or if any of this is tied to Amdocs(Israeli company which does about 98% of the phone billing in the US) ?
I just checked google news and this story didn't make the front page. How about using a slashdot to bring some additional attention to the issue. Follow the link http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8& q=domestic+surveillance+phone+calls&btnG=Search+Ne ws and click on the USA Today story. If google gets enough people searching on the topic maybe it will make the front page.
I'll be out of this country (US) in 2008, I'm getting the hell out while it's still POSSIBLE to. Too many apathetic idiots live here to bother trying to fight what's happening here. I'll find some place where freedom is more than an ideal that was enjoyed in the past. After the revolution occurs, I can consider coming back.
The problem with granting government excessive power over citizens in order to catch criminals is that criminals can get jobs in government.
Please, please do not go down that road. I have a good friend who got into that scene, bought that book, went to seminars, etc. Ended up spending thousands of dollars on those people only to be sued by the IRS and owe tens of thousands more. Those people are scam artists, plain and simple, and their "theories" about the IRS are the biggest load of horseshit ever. I will repeat: their theories about taxation DO NOT STAND UP IN COURT, no matter what personal anecdotes they tell you. Get out now, while you still have some money left.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Call these fools and let them know how you feel.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
It's a win-win for the Government and the big corporations. Too bad the citizens are too busy following "American Idol" or "24" to notice.
What was that adage about slowly cooking a frog, again?
Got tinfoil?
You gotta love when, on a science and tech website, a request for evidence is considered "flamebait".
Clear, Dark Skies
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/domestic_spying;_ylt=Al tzCvZmCXzQ.QsFg5wYT2Os0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBH NlYwN0bQ--
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Thu May 11, 6:59 AM ET
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.
Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December. He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance.
"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," said Hinchey.
In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of its own agency's lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.
Bush's decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program's legal justification.
The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA's activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terror network.
Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.
___
On the Net:
Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility: http://www.usdoj.gov/opr/index.html
National Security Agency: http://www.nsa.gov/home_html.cfm
1. Declare the US Govt to no longer be a legitimate government. They are a criminal organization. They have no authoruity to rule.
2. Demand impeachemnt, trial in the Sennate, conviction, Removal from office, indictment in criminal court, trial, conviction, sentencing, & execution.
3. Train myself for civil war...it's been while since I did live-fire CQB drills. Guess what I'm doing the week after finals?
4. Swich from SBC/AT&T to Quest, or just cancel my local phone service.
5. Spend this summer building WMDs to take out federal buildings.
Andy Out!
Posting from the US. If there is freedom of speech here, this post will appear as a comment on slashdot.com If this post appears, there is, in fact freedom of speech. I will post another one that claims that there is no freedom of speech in the US. If that one appears as well, then I guess we'll know for sure!
Anybody know what became of it, or if there's still an ongoing investigation? Or if not, why not?
It's funsightful? Infunny? Funsighty? Infunful?
Earlier in his remarks he had warned about what he saw as unjustified government spending proposals and continued with a warning that "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex... Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower
He's motivated by a belief that killing innocent people will make an imaginary deity happy enough to give him an afterlife
best described as a juvenile porno Disneyland.
Religion may be socially acceptable madness, but it's no less crazy for all its popularity.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
When a single tap in a particular exchange just isn't enough...build your own microwave interception tower. Try searching for capenhurst and GCHQ.
IANAL, but can this violation be punished through a class-action lawsuit against the telcos for violating Section 222 of the Communications Act? For violation of privacy? I for one no longer want to use Verizon.
"The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear."
I think the usefulness is pretty obvious. If you find out someone is a suspect in a terror investigation, you can look at all the phone calls they have made.
Of course, locking everyone in their house every night would be a good counterterrorism tool too, but that doesn't mean it's the type of government we want to live with.
It's possible that they tbds9pre h5yq[4,fmh-9n8 yf [ h4ve
This is just a countrywide "PEN REGISTER".
This information is not constitutionally protected.
The "PEN REGISTER" act simply says that a "this helps a criminal investigation" statement has to be made to
an appropriate Judge (e.g. FISA) - even for the whole country - yes that takes the ultimate of chutzpah/hubris/balls to pull off but legally there is nothing wrong with it.
However,
As the QWEST lawyers have apparently said the NSA refused to get this type of warrant. Is that because they didn't think they could get it from FISA? I don't think so. Even I, with my current political bent, would have given them the warrant provided there was a separate chain of command doing oversight. I think the idea is a good one provided that we KNEW we could trust everyone who could get/use the information (i.e. no political interference).
The very fact that they did not go to FISA apparently means that THERE WAS POLITICAL INTERFERENCE already.
The PATRIOT act extended the PEN REGISTER ACT to the Internet so the same telcos are probably helping there as well.
So presumably the NSA is at least getting the same information about VOIP calls in those cases.
(again most likely without warrant - but then that means they are violating the PATRIOT ACT!)
So let us be very speculative for a moment: Why did Bush/NSA pre-PATRIOT ACT and pre-IRAQ go to all of this trouble to violate warrant requirements?
(other than neccessity/expediency: do we ever believe BUSH ever does anything only on that basis?)
Answer: Any such request to any Court violates need-to-know and violates the idea of an Unitary (or Imperial if you like) Presidency.
Implication: What is this information really going to be used for after it is determined that no terrorists are using telecommunications networks for anything other than "GO/NO-GO"?
The right to keep and bear arms is indeed an acknowledgement that a mere 200+ years ago this country was won with arms used to rise up against an oppresive government (you've gotten much better, UK ;) and that the time may come again when action is necessary.
Do you really believe that some citizen's milita is going to do squat against the US military? Just out of curiosity, how many bullets do you own? How many bullets are readily available on the free market? How many people can make their own? The US military that the total number of bullets available domestically to civilians, from the market and home manufacture, is enough for about two days of serious fighting. That's not even counting the tanks, planes, mortars, and nuclear frikkin' weapons.
Yah, you and your drinking buddies are sure gonna stomp those military fools, come the revolution.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Upon reading this post, my initial reaction was something akin to karmic suicide. After two or three breaths I decided to check the poster's history and freaks list. Enlightening...
"09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0"
I could understand such invasive tactis if the US were experiencing acts of terrorism say, at least a couple times a year, but really, nothing's happening. This is all "pre-emptive" actions based on bullshit.
No wonder the telco/ISPs will get to block VoIP communications. No handy pen registers on an encrypted stream of packets going through offshore routers, eh?
Who would have thought that the US government would collect personal information on it's own citizens. They've just been able to put it on top of the table now that the patriot act enumerates that what they've been doing anyways is cool.
Anyone who thinks their government doesnt want to know everything they can about their citizens activities and doesnt store it all on some massive hard disk somewhere is being Naive. I'm sure this Post itself will make it into some Gov't Data Center too.
Hey Uncle Same How's it going. It's been a log time (400ms or so) since you logged some personal info about me. It's cool though I know you've been snooping for a while thanks for finally admitting it.
I've actually had dreams recently about Bush further eroding civil rights continuing to outright ignoring and trying to rewrite the Constitution that made me so angry, I've been awoken by my body suddenly punching at the nearest wall (thank god I'm single right now). The people that run this administration are not only corrupt but neurotic to imagine they're going to get away with this stuff. In fact, I have it on rather good authority (and by authority I mean someone else that's become disillusioned who works at the WH... shhhh) that the reason there's been so much voting fishery is that if the Democrats gain control of both Houses again, there is going to be a decent sized shitstorm when they start firing off real inquiries. I'm not talking conspiracy theories about 9/11, I'm talking about things like the large amounts of "insider trading" that lots of congressmen are engaging in by playing the stock market according to their votes on legislation and good deal of bending the rules (this could be going on at the patent offices too, but haven't heard anything).
There's just a huge fuckton of bad shit that's been snowballing in DC for a while now, and this administration has no idea how to stop it. If real investigations are launched, I can promise you that there is no containment strategy (talking about leaks here, not commies) on the planet that's going ward off this one. Someone's going to crack and spill it all.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
People seemed to be getting worked up about the NSA keeping records of which number they've dialed. Let's do a little math and see how many conversations we could record in a year for a paltry $10 million. Your cellphone uses a digital vo-coder that operates at 8kbits/sec. That's 1k bytes/sec. Over on newegg they've got a 300GB Seagate hard drive selling for $99. So $10 million buys you 100,000 drives or 30 petabytes (30E15) of storage. At 1k byte/sec, you'll be able to record 30E12 seconds or 5E11 minutes of conversation. The average phone call lasts somewhere around 6 minutes. So we could record about 83E9 conversations. There are about 300E6 people in the U.S., so 83E9 conversations is 270 6-minute phone calls for every man, woman, and child in the country. I'd be surprised to find out that my calls haven't been permanently recorded for many years now.
I, for one welcome, our new Mexican overlords....
The descendants of Aztlan will not put up with this shit. They won't sacrifice their....
oh wait. nevermind.
I don't believe we'll ever see it below a yellow (elevated) level. Ever.
Perhaps the NSA can help me track down all these fax calls I've been getting on my home phone. It's really annoying.
The metric shouldn't be whether or not the current administration/government officials/law enforcement officials (etc) are abusing power and invading privacy, but rather whether or not any given power can be abused and what oversight exists to protect the rights of the innocent (or the accused) in the case that such abuse happens.
Absolutely. Even if someone is a die-hard Republican who trusts the party religiously and believes that no wrongdoing has ever been done by the administration, they need to consider the possibility that the tools and powers established over the last 6 years may someday be in the hand of a Democrat president. For all the conservatives out there, picture Hillary Clinton with unlimited wiretapping and information access.
I can't figure out for the life of me why all the Republicans I knew in the 90s who were vehemently opposed to government intrusion into people's private lives are so very fucking eager to open the doors now. Was it 9/11? Did they get scared, are they that weak that they're hoping for any piece of illusionary safety they can scrabble up? The more cynical part of me says no, it's because all the branches of the government are controlled by Republicans now, and they want more power for their guys.
The complete and total lack of oversight, and additionally the strident opposition to any kind of oversight of control, is very troubling. Take the FISA warrants issue. There is one judge who approves FISA warrants. He's had this job for years. He has a security clearance higher then God. He barely ever turns down a warrant request, somthing like over 90 percent are approved. This judge is on call 24/7, and has signed warrant requests in his pajamas. If the government doesn't want to wait for a warrant, they can go ahead and wiretap on a target, if they think it's really really urgent, and they have 3 fucking days to go and get the warrant after the fact. They have the ability to essentially get the warrant to search the house after they've searched it. How much easier could it be? It's not like the administration never used or obtained FISA warrants either, they used it lots, so it's not like they were opposed to the program as a whole or somehow unaware of it.
What that means is one of two things. Either the people doing the wiretapping were lazy, and didn't want to get a warrant, or they were doing something blatantly illegal and a blatant abuse of power, like spying on completely innocent people for political reasons during an election campaign or something similar, and didn't want anyone to know about it. Even if it's just laziness, I'm not happy about it, I don't want the defenders of the country to be too lazy to do their job right.
that was longer than expected, but a rant felt necessary
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
Why, because before then they were Freedom Fighters. Heroic patriots standing up for their freedom from the terrible aggression of the Soviet army.
Hell, both James Bond and Rambo helped out al-Qae... sorry, the Afghan Mujaheddin against the Russians.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I just waited on hold for 25 minutes to speak with a Verizon call center supervisor and she claims that "only" the Verizon local and long distance business units are involved in this program and that VW would not be involved over privacy concerns.
While I only take this with a grain of salt the size of the Rock of Gibraltar, it is somewhat reassuring at this time that my only phone is a cell.
If anyone has any definitive information that VW is in fact involved, I want to hear it as in that case I would be changing my service to someone who is not participating as soon as possible.
that in my post just down-thread, which I wrote before seeing yours, I had New Zealand listed as an example of a "good" country.
Believe me, if it wasn't for friends and family in the States, I'd be relocating. I could live in Middle Earth! Still might retire there. You guys need an electrician/generator mechanic with military experience? My wife's a nurse, if that helps.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
(from the cited McPaper article) "She added that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government "are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists." All government-sponsored intelligence activities "are carefully reviewed and monitored," Perino said. She also noted that "all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States."
So we are now admitting that ALL intelligence activities are aimed at the pursuit of al-Qaeda and other terrorists. Boy, that makes me feel secure! We are only paying attention to the idiot who hit us.
There's ALOT more to pay attention to in this world than just the al-Qaeda threat. However, it explains many things (Iraq, etc.)
If all we are doing is looking at the known threat, the un-known one is going to come up and bite us in the ass, hard. Even Clinton understood that...
*pulls out two cups and some string* Good luck NSA...
It's hard to believe that the NSA has around 200 million employees sitting in a small room listening to all your phone calls to your (295,734,134 is about the total US population) girlfriends and coworkers. Amazing! You guys should maybe go to a nice country like Iraq or Nigeria and wait till all this blows over. No, really, get out of my country. Maybe if you all leave we won't have to explain every single detail of our intelligence plans to the ENEMY for a while. You know what, maybe we'll just put you in internment camps for aiding and abetting the enemy. =]
"They can't run on the war. They can't run on the economy, where the positive numbers on growth are offset by the largely stagnant numbers on median incomes and the public's growing dread of outsourcing. Immigration may play in various congressional districts, but it's too dicey an issue to nationalize. Even social conservatives may be growing weary of outlawing gay marriage every other November. Nobody's buying the ownership society. Competence? Ethics? You kidding?"
But wiretapping could be a solid issue to run on. If the Democrats harp on it, they will drive away moderate Republicans who think the administration is just doing what it needs to do to win the "war on terror." So the administration should be trying to feed the fire and focus attention on the issue - for example, by resisting investigation to drag out discussion, and by slowly allowing controversial new details about the program to surface.
The meat of the article is simply this: The government is collecting "external" data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting "internals," a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for "social network analysis," the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together. The NSA is consolidating and analyzing already collected data to try to stop terrorist attacks before they happen.
I'd rather frame this argument another way: For those who complain about this - how would YOU gather intelligence on terrorists inside the US? Personally, I see this as no more intrusive than Amazon telling me "people who bought this book also bought this..." It's data mining and my privacy is not compromised.
"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes."
(It's not known for sure if Stalin actually said this or not. Still a good point.)
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
the bad guys will use Quest for all of their planning
President Bush is going to make an official statement on the wiretapping reported in USA Today ten minutes from now at the time of writing, at noon Eastern Time. You can probably view it on C-SPAN for commercial free coverage, but CNN, MSNBC, or FOX will be covering it if they aren't. Also, donate a penny or two to C-SPAN. They work hard to provide live coverage of House and Senate debate to you for free. And that Colbert White House dinner video (which they sold to Google Video.)
If you aren't going to use them, you might as well not have them. Your guns have done nothing whatsoever to protect your freedom and they will continue to do nothing as long as they are not used.
Honestly! Anyone who thinks that we aren't going to head into a police state just because we had handguns and rifles obviously isn't thinking.
When will you use your guns? Are you part of a militia that could organize against national guard and army troops being sent into your town? Would you be ready to use your guns if a SWAT team showed up at your door to arrest you on phony charges of drugs, child pornography, or anything else reprehensible and easily planted that will make your neighbors say, "I guess I just didn't know the guy," instead of, "Hey, why is HE being hauled off?" How far do you think you'd get against a SWAT team? (Ruby Ridge or Waco, anyone?)
People may point to Iraq for an example of how a less well-armed guerilla war can mess with our modern Army. I'll rebut to them that we don't have large caches of full-automatic weapons and explosives just lying around for the population to sack. Do you know how to make your own explosive materials, shaped charges, and IEDs? Have you had insurgent / survivalist training? I hope not, for your sake, since you'll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. If I were planning a military takeover of the US, the first thing I'd do is spend a few months repeating Waco at every single seperatist militia compound in the US.
The right to own firearms protecting the Constitutional rights of citizens. Hah! Don't make me laugh. If anything, it'll be the Neo-Brownshirts that have them in the first place.
I wonder why AT&T has been so helpful to the NSA in their "investigations". Perhaps their were backroom deals regarding recent net nuetrality hearings that would have bettered the position of AT&T in that particular bit of legislation Perhaps we should be careful to see how much certain institutions have to gain politically before we allow them to set cookies? . In all seriousness however AT&T owns if not the largest one of the largest fiber-optic networks in the country. It does provide one plausible answer to the question "Why would AT&T spy on its own customers?".
Answer: "Anytime we want to."
Perhaps democracy is really flawed at the core. IF it is supposed to work then this is the goverment the people want and therefore they don't want all that nonsense of innocent until proven guilty and due process. OR if democracy don't work then it is all just a costly sham to cover up you are living in a dictatorship.
Anyone know exactly how do you start a revolution. Perhaps I should make some calls. Oh wait a minute, someone is at the doo..[CONNECTION DROPPED]
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Exactly how is this funny?
Then prosecute per political discretion.
Is this surprising to anyone?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I wonder what sort of food terrorists get delivered when they're up all night planning an attack...
And in other news today, Han Song Yi Chinese delivery restaurants in New York are under investigation after it was learned Abdullah Akmed ordered Moo Goo Gai Pan on no less then 4 separate occasions while planning an attack on the Empire State building. Authorities are concerned as to whether or not there may be a Chinese government contact working at Han Song Yi restaurants, and patriotic citizens are advised not to eat there. And the terror alert level is still at Red.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
This can only get worse as the technology improves. In the UK we are soon to have a network that can track cars in real time. Mobile phones can pinpoint your location. In the not too distant future it will be possible for all citizens to have their activities recorded from cradle to grave.
When will this data be available in Google?
Please speak directly into the flowerpot, sir...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Ahh... 6 billion friends and counting.
I wonder what you all will get me for my birthday?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I remember after 9/11 and the 9/11 commission or whatever that was founded to find out how 9/11 happened. They found that the breakdown in intelligence was rooted in the over reliance on technology and not having enough spies and stuff on the ground, infiltrating these terrorist groups. It seems that the Government hasn't learnt its lesson because this over reliance on technology is what allowed 9/11 to happen.
Do you like this news so far? Here's the best bit, which I heard on NPR this morning:
The man who was in charge of this operation at the NSA is THE SAME GUY that Bush appointed to be the head of the CIA.
... now what was that I seem to remember about the right hand and the left hand doing something?
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
Yes, I'm proud of my country (even though that won't win me any friends on America-hating slashdot).
You fail to see what love for your country truly is.
You see, you have a "Mommy is never wrong, and people who say she is are bad!" kind of love for the country. America is not the Fatherland or the Motherland. We are citizens of a democracy and not slaves to some Confuscian hierarchical autocracy where we are meant to show our absolute obedience to those above us like a father.
Our nation is our creation -- our child. True patriots love their nation like it was their kid. Like our child, we can criticise the things that we love and still love them.
Would you say that a parent loved a child that they ignored the drug abuse and promiscuity of, or would you say that a parent loved a child that they disciplined and tried to make into a great person? Love for our nation means making sure that it doesn't go astray and become a monster that loots our purses for money to go get a hit off its addictions and beat up others.
Love for our nation means holding it to higher principles. It is not a lazy act of saluting the flag and trusting whoever has a title attached to their name like President or Officer. Love for our nation means treating its values as standards to always strive for. It's one thing to thump our chests and say that we're better than other nations because of the principles we say we believe in. It's another thing entirely to make sure that we actually live up to them and let others do the praising.
Your sort of false patriotism is the root of every fascist or communist state that was born from a democracy. As soon as respect for the country becomes more important than the country acting to earn respect, the end is in sight.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There are now so many laws that it is literally impossible for a citizen to be 100% law-abiding. This didn't happen by chance; it's by design. The more laws (especially laws which target peaceful, non-violent individuals), the more revenue, control, and power available to those who wield the law for their own benefit.
:D If I hadn't squandered yesterday's points, I'd have done it myself ...
I would love to see the parent modded up, preferably as insightful.
After the 90's mess with the ATF *KILLING* American's, I seriously doubt the NSA is going anywhere.
No Secrets Allowed....
Oops..... how come they don't practice what they impose on others?
for three days the NSA's computer systems were down...... All of them.
they didn't take y2k serious enough. and certainly weren't much up on teh 9/11 attack.
How smart can they really be? information is dangerious in the hands of the stupid.
And what was the top story on the news, even though this information about domestic spying is dire?
That some dipshit got booted off American Idol.
And we wonder why Americans are stupid, not fighting for their rights, not taking up arms and having an American Revolution.
American Idol...
The USA gets the government it deserves. If they aren't going to be vigilant about protecting their freedoms, let them become a police state.
I'm moving to someplace else, thank you.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Voiceover: "Talking about flowers? Push 1 to automatically order a bouquet of irises from NSAflowers.com. [Nearly unintelligible garble] shippingandhandlingextraincludesbuiltinsecuritycam era"
Later on: "We notice you are criticizing the NSA, please push 1 now to call the CIA and turn yourself in or push 2 for the FBI."
"The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bars electronic surveillance of people within the U.S. without individual approval by the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court."
e illance_controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surv
I never said that fighting the war on terrorism would require the creation of "a police state." Nor did I suggest that we are already living in a police state, although you seem fairly quick to want me to say that - perhaps it's easier to label me a wild-eyed hippie freak than to, you know, actually address the thing that I said. Which was essentially this:
I didn't call Alberto Gonzales a fascist, or Bush a liar, and I haven't called for Rumsfeld to be fired. (See my earlier point about creating a strawman.)
What I did say was that the administration has claimed repeatedly that Congress does not have the legal authority to regulate any aspect of the administration's intelligence gathering operation. That's not name calling, it's fact: FISA clearly and unambiguously lays out the framework for conducting certain kinds of surveillance, and the administration has flat out said that it doesn't need to abide by those rules. I'm not demonizing the administration, I'm quoting them, and if you think I'm exaggerating you should actually read the memorandums and testimony from Gonzales and Yoo. I leave googling that testimony as an exercise for the reader.
I'll be the first to admit that polls are flawed. If you choose to believe that this is because of a media conspiracy on the part of the NYT, CNN, and the rest of what's often called the "liberal media," fine. But I think that even you would have a hard time arguing that Fox News is biased towards the left, and even they are showing anemic poll numbers for the president. The reason I brought the poll numbers about the censure issue up in the first place is because you asserted that a "great silent majority" of American citizens sided with you on this issue: I can only assume you called them silent because of their failure to speak up in polls like this one.
As for whether or not this is a "mindless partisan rant," I leave it to the readers of Slashdot to decide for themselves which one of us is trying to make this into a partisan issue. But in the interest of disclosure: I think it's the one who implied that I'm a "narcissist" and a "loonie."
where I'm hiding my PMD's
Pizzas of Mass Deliciousness
Damn you Dominos!!! I'm ordering on the internet from now on!!
Here is the kicker though, are you ready?
This is the NSA doing this.
Why is this important?
Well, in 1952, the NSA was formed to spy on foreign governments.
From the NSA's original charter: "The COMINT mission of the National Security Agency (NSA) shall be to provide an effective, unified organization and control of the communications intelligence activities of the United States conducted against foreign governments, to provide for integrated operational policies and procedures pertaining thereto. As used in this directive, the terms "communications intelligence" or "COMINT" shall be construed to mean all procedures and methods used in the interception of communications other than foreign press and propaganda broadcasts and the obtaining of information from such communications by other than intended recipients, but shall exclude censorship and the production and dissemination of finished intelligence." (emphasis added).
Domestic surveillance, on U.S. soil of U.S. citizens is new territory for the spooks. Do Constitutaionl rules apply? Who knows. You could be picked up based on NSA-gathered info and end up in Gitmo or worse, and no one would ever know. THAT's the real story and begs the obvious question, why not leave this to the FBI? Probably because such a program would be subject to, oh, I dont know... due process of law.
Bush Lies On the Record.
These smart, peace-loving God-fearers are called the Amish, I think.
I've got no problem with people who want to live in a community with a sixteenth-century worldview,
so long as they're consenting adults and limit themselves to sixteenth-century technology. Where
we get into trouble is when modern-day medievalists get their hands on technology created by that
Enlightenment thing they've rejected. Whether it's a muslim with C4 or a baptist with an SUV,
it's trouble coming from a mismatch of their culture's beliefs and my culture's capabilities.
So pick one or the other and stick with it -- ditch the tribal myths and wake up, or go buy
a buggy. Living in both worlds isn't going to get you any more respect than an astrologer
should expect from an astrophysicist, or an alchemist from a nanotechnologist.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
I, for one, welcome our new NSA overlords!
Oh, wait a minute, that wasn't funny. Kinda creepy, in fact.
I take it most people have not seen Enemy of the State when it first came out in 1998. This is the same sort of thing from that movie -- but even creepier! How exactly is this new news? I suppose you could call it news but its not really all that new (unless you count anything in the last decade new). For all we know the NSA could also see your house by tapping into one of their own video streams, correct? How about what your typing into your textbox on Slashdot right now? (pauses) Perhaps they are tapping those telecommunication lines also. This article might only serve as a ploy to get you to give them more information out about yourself (cringes).
Would that be Koresh, or Ruby Ridge? Both were crackpots. American crackpots.
This is why we need more consolidation in the telecom business -- so there is less chance that a rogue company like QWest will fail to bow down before King George.
What the hell is a matter with QWest? Don't they know "everything changed" after 9/11? Don't they know we are at "war" with Al Qaeda, or is it Eurasia we've always been at war with?
"Oh Well, I Wasn't Using My Civil Liberties Anyway!"
Of course, we're assuming that people are uniformly linked, and that they call forty-two people at some point. Is there a back-of-the-envelope formula for the number of degrees of separation on average between any two points in a randomly generated graph with i nodes and j links per node?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
So the gov't should go around shooting crackpots?
From my understanding of it, the ATF simply didn't like Koresh and his group and wanted to take them out, even though they hadn't done anything to warrant it.
Don't know anything about Ruby Ridge, sorry.
okay, so you are r*ping our civil liberties and p***ing all over our privacy - all under the veil of secrecy.
good thing you are incompetent there, too, or we'd never even know, right?
at least you make each day exciting - we never know what nefarious activities will be leaked due to your incompetence.
good thing the #1 and #2 of the cia (i think) are busy playing poker with prostitutes... do these two guys linked to duke's briber get to keep their retirements?
anyway, has all this invasion from our own government actually RESULTED in any convictions of bad guys?
no, i don't mean locking up of guys you deem bad, BUT CAN'T PROVE IT IN A COURT OF LAW.
please tell me that you've at least caught one single, lone terrorist that you actually could reasonably and rationally convict based on trampling of the country formerly of the free...
or are you so incompetent that you took everything for ZERO RESULTS?
In the case of Koresh, something had to be done. I just disagree with the possible use of Delta Force in that incident.
In the case of Ruby Ridge we have a situation where the ineptness of the FBI made a bad situation worse. In particular the sniper who took out the woman holding the kid should be placed in the general population of a maximum security prison. We'd see how tough the badass is up close and personal when he's not behind his weapon.
Speaking of the end of the rule of Law, check out This American Life's Habeus Schmaebeus show.
"A major asteroid strike, a flu epidemic, or even something as banal as an economic crash could lie 10 years in the future - does that mean that we should all run for the hills and dig deep shelters in the name of protection?"
Obviously you didn't read any of the Y2K books that came out.
And going completely nutso over the incident to the point that the government tramples our rights means that the terrorists got exactly what they wanted, to change our way of life.
Remember the days when you could step foot in a public place without emptying your pockets and walking through metal detectors? Remember when you could take a flight somewhere without arriving 4 hours early to get through security and give you enough time to still make your flight if the random check pulls you aside for your body cavity search?
Are your papers in order?
wet dream, or act of deliberate masturbation?
either way, when the complete truth is known, if it ever can be, we'll most likely all be dead, one way or another.
I think that believing that your set of beliefs is so superior to everyone else's that you are justified in killing them whenever and however you like is a mental defect, your brain is not functioning properly if you honestly hold those beliefs.
There are plenty of people with mental problems in the world, too. Take a well recognisied one like Schizophrenia. According to most studies, the prevalance rate is about one half of one percent over a lifetime. That means with the current population, about 36 million people either have or will have Schizophrenia to varying degrees.
Well I'd personally argue that extremism is also a mental defect. When you become so narcissistic, so full of hate, so convinced you live the One True Way(tm) that everyone else are just flies to be swatted, well I'd call you insane. You need treatment, or at the very least to be locked away where you can't hurt people. It's not an ideological viewpoint that I should accept as rational and respect, it's a symptom of a deep mental problem.
Seriously, if this is all Bush's doing, we should applaude. It is amazing to pull all this off in a few years in a govenment as big as the US, and keep it under wraps.
THINK!! This isn't a President's fault! Yes, they might have said "Ok" to somebody, but this is run by somebody sitting in an office with a wierd title, whose term never expires. It takes a long time to get this, the other survalence stuff and all the DARPA and Fort Mead computers and such funded and set up.
>Even if someone is a die-hard Republican who trusts the party religiously and believes that no wrongdoing has
>ever been done by the administration, they need to consider the possibility that the tools and powers established
>over the last 6 years may someday be in the hand of a Democrat president. For all the conservatives out there,
>picture Hillary Clinton with unlimited wiretapping and information access.
Now you see why it's in the interest of National Security that the Republican Party remain in power, indefinitely. These powers are necessary to fight terrorism, and at the same time it's equally necessary that they not fall into the Wrong (Democrat) Hands. The mechanisms for handling this need not be mentioned, but they are clearly justified by the ends.
Count this one as fun conspiracy theory. To be honest, I suspect these folks are so busy dodging alligators that they haven't thought too hard about post-Bush. Plus how much of this capability is really embodied in a confluence of partisan staffers, and would simply evaporate with an administrative change.
Besides, the Democrats are in such disarray there isn't much threat of them taking the Office, soon.
Besides, the Republicans may choose to lose in 2008, depending on when the financial (debt) crash is expected. Though maybe they don't anticipate a crash, and think they're right on plan, starving the beast, and getting set to roll back every vestige of post-Hoover government.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It would do well for you to read the consitution, Article 1, then read the 16th Amendment again. Repeat. You will soon see that the 16th does not in anyway modify the original taxing powers of congress, as you seem to believe. We know this because the Surpreme court has said so, and held so in many cases.
However the statement of my signature needs not to consider either. If you look at what is taxed when it comes to "wages" (the word my sig uses, note it does not mention "income") you will find a few definition in the legal code. 26 USC 3401, and 26 USC 3121. Anyone having wages as defined in either section has a liability created in that respective section. (One is the wages and the withholding provisions, the other is Social Security (& Medicare))
The Social Security wage tax is that, a tax on the wages as defined. I ask, do you have qualifying wages for the tax? (This is a Subtitle C tax)
The slightly harder point to argue are the subtitle A taxes, and involves all income, from whatever source derived. The question is though, of what is income? The statutes provide a circular definition. However the Courts have held that "income is not all that comes in" and have also held that "the 16th did not extend [what could be taxed] to new or unexpected subjects".
For the real definition of income, it is nescessary to dive into the historical record. I'd suggest reading the 1909-1913 congressional debates on the subject of the 16th. Having read my own suggested reading, it is completely clear that what *I* make has never been considered "income".
Yes, there are a lot of shisters out there, that will swindle you. But you have to read and understand the law for yourself. The IRS is counting on you being too lazy to actually do that.
Honestly, how many years have you been paying taxes without reading a word of the tax code?
Once, you do, you'll know how the IRS ropes you into a system that is very hard to leave. Even if your findings are not the same as mine, I urge you to read up anyway. It can't hurt.
Remember the IRS is a collection company. They aren't even a part of the federal government. They are the desigated agency for revenue collection. (One person tried to sue the IRS, but the government was forced to pleade in court that the IRS could not represent itself, so the government has to represent the IRS on behalf of the IRS.) They try to collect as much as possible, so you really have to read and decide for yourself.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
F2.
If Bin Laden had seen the devastation after the tornados that tore through my neighborhood (let alone in N.O. last year after the hurricane), he'd have been jealous.
Fuck the terrouhig769y[no carrier]
Fascism is state control of all aspects of society. Political, economic, corporate, professional.
Corporatism is where un-elected committees (lobbists) take a direct role in making legislature.
And America has become more of both those than the Republic as it was founded.
Like I was saying, it's going to take a revolution. We're headed for one, and you're going to see martial law, riots and looting in thousands of cities, army desertions and summary court-marshall executions for article 134 (as well as others).
It is going to get seriously fucked up around here, and it's going to be petroleum that gets the revolution started. Stock up on food and ammo. Make yourself an active-charcoal water filter using a paper filters and a trashcan.
We are headed for a god damn revolution, and it's not going to be fucking Nintendo making the son of a bitch...
News like this is music to the ears of the enemies of this country (foreign and domestic). We officially have no real freedom. I already knew that I had to keep my political views relatively private (no picketing or getting involved in 3rd parties like the green party or libertarian) but that is not a reality anymore. I can't have a political conversation over e-mail, forum or phone without the chance of the government recording it. After I'm in a database for having radical thoughts, (that the US is not a democracy) I can forget about having political aspirations, or high level work in corporations or government. Its either play by the rules or ??????
Can anyone think of a REALISTIC way of not becoming a police state? There is simply no way that we can fix it by voting (it cannot be accounted properly). I'm very scared to say this, but the only way I can see to escape this reality is by a NO VOTE campaign. Voting for anyone is saying that the system work. If enough people didn't vote the system would have to change. But then again, that is not a real possibility, VOTING is good, even if you vote for a tyrant (according to the government).
Call me what you want but I have decided to become part of the system. I will graduate and go on to work for a giant corporation (AKA, the real government). My plan is to make as much money as I can and buy me a politician or two. That's the only way I can have a real say in this country. It is true that by to a lot of money and keep it, I will have to run over many, many people, and cheat, and make use of slave labor in other countries, and maybe even buy background information on other people so I can legally blackmail them... but so is the system. F**k being moral... I have to look out for my family and me. Good luck everyone... We WILL need it.
It's all about finding better ways
"The simple reality is that laws benefit the power elite, and that's exactly why every year there are thousands more laws on the books than the year before. Government is in the business of coercion, not liberty."*
Indeed. So how does the "power elite" benefit from laws like; "Thou shall not murder"? Maybe part of the reason we have more laws is that one, the world is getting more complicated (crazy I know. More knowledge was suppose to make the world simpler. It sure as hell isn't making us wiser). Two, more people at all levels of society are trying to see what they can get away with without getting caught. e.g. copyright infringement, Enron. But of course demonizing and conspiracy theories are so much better at getting at the truth, and solving the world's problems. Just look at how well it's worked in the past.
*You have a point. It's just not the whole picture.
The real reason for the surge in domestic spying is so Republican Party operatives can know all they want to about Democratic Party communications, without risking being caught breaking into offices as happened during the Watergate scandal.
have fun sorting and identifying all the numbers with your short stack of employees.
While their at it, i want the NSA agent's phone numbers as well. Just in case they are terrorists.
Also, just because someone is paranoid doesn't mean that people aren't out to get them.
Lon Horiuchi, the sniper who liied Randy Weaver's wife is a serious nutcase.
...
I knew an FBI agent who _knew_ Lon Horiuchi, and he said the only difference between this guy and a serial
killer was that he had permission from the Feds.
Randy Weaver has more forgiveness than I have. If Horiuchi had killed my wife
Pretty sad that he's at Score:1 when the UK is on the road to something that will make 1984 look positively cosy.
More background information on this whole "Pen Register" information can be found on. html Crignely's January 19th 2006 posting, There's a Long History of Intercepting Foreign Communications, and Some of It May Have Been Legal.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060119
I saw a demo of one of Cogito's products in February. The product finds relationships between people by using phone records, criminal histories, and credit card transactions. The NSA was supposed to be the client.
http://www.cogitoinc.com/
It scared the crap out of me.
Billy Bob Bain
So you want to make a difference on the domestic wiretapping issue.
GOAL: To have Members of the Appropriations Committee understand that voters are concerned about this issue in an election year. Appropriators control the cash, and therefore control the government.
OPPORTUNITY: The upcoming Memorial Day Congressional recess represents the real beginning of the campaign season. Members will be back in the district, and will be attending public events - they are looking for your input and your help on Election Day.
Click below to see if your Representative is a Member of the Appropriations Committee:
ahref=http://appropriations.house.gov/index.cfm?Fu seAction=AboutTheCommittee.MemberList&Subcommittee Id=18rel=url2html-3465http://appropriations.house. gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=AboutTheCommittee.MemberL ist&SubcommitteeId=18>
STRATEGY: Attend a public event; politely and respectfully raise concerns about the NSA activity. Have members feel that halting the NSA program is better than taking flak from voters.
Key points to get across:
1. He/She is an appropriator, and you appreciate the power of the purse for your town.
2. The NSA is funded by Congress, therefore he/she has the ability to stop it, or at least learn more about it and let you know why he/she supports it.
SCRIPT: Below is a script and things to remember. This is written specifically for Appropriators.
"Representative XXXXX, It was great to hear you speak today about the ways you have helped [town name]. I think all of us here appreciate the work you have done as a Member of the Appropriations committee to make sure that [town name] is taken care of. We all know that the power of the pursestrings is crucial back in Washington.
But I've got a question about another appropriations issue. Recently, USAToday reported that the National Security Agency is "secretly collecting the phone call records of millions of Americans". In other words, the government is keeping tabs not only my overseas calls, but even when I call my Aunt Milly down the street. This just seems wrong to me.
So what I want to know is if you supported appropriating funds for this NSA project?"
POSSIBLE FOLLOWUPS BUT CHOOSE ONLY ONE
--- Do you think the NSA should be allowed to keep records of every call I make even domestically?
--- Have you been kept informed of the NSA's activities on this front? And if not, would you be willing to withhold funds until you are properly informed? Not just members of the Intel committee, but the people who approve the money - you for example.
--- And if it was buried in part of a bigger budget, are you willing to work with other Appropriators to withhold funds until this domestic data collection is stopped?
TERRORISM FOLLOWUP (if your representative says they had to b/c of Al Qaeda)
--- I can probably come up with a reason that the NSA can watch who I'm calling, but they are keeping all the records, even after they have determined I'm not calling a terrorist. That seems dangerous and wrong. I'm worried about what future Presidents will do with this data, regardless of Al Qaeda.
THINGS TO REMEMBER
Do not raise more than one point in your statement. Members will focus on the point they can answer, and skip the rest. So if you feel that you have another important issue as well, make it about that. Don't mix.
Be prepared with a copy of the article to give to a staffer. Give a PAPER copy, not just a promise to email.
Do not get antagonistic with the Representative. All you are trying to do is establish publicly that his constituents have a problem with the NSA's domestic surveillance. You want him/her to return to Washington, go to the staff and say "why am I
Quoting USA Today:
So: the NSA asks for a massive database of call records, not limited to a specific group of people, without a warrant. Qwest asks them to please take it to the FISA court. The NSA refuses on the grounds that the FISA court might say no. (Note: the approval rate for FISA requests is signfigantly higher than 99%.)
As I said. The current administration simply does not want to be constrained by the rule of law.
You are a fucking idiot
Why is everyone so upset, after all, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"
John has a long moustache. The chair is against the wall
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Fox News? CNN? I only rely on them for video footage -- I'll leave my fact-gathering and news research to the Web aggregate, thanks.
body massage!
And if those steely eyed mo-fos "whack" an innocent family you just recruited yourself a hundred new enraged Al Queda terrorists, that sure helped didn't it? How about we leave people in the middle east to their own fate and become old school paleo-con non interventionists and working on kicking the foreign oil addiction, hmmmmm...
8 966
How about a left-right alliance to protect the constitution and stop interventionist wars? We need to to do something to break out of the dumbocracy of both Dems and Repigs who strip us of our rights without even blinking.
See for example: http://www.antiwar.com/orig/eddlem.php?articleid=
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
The problem is, what about cell phones?
Encrypted VOIP solutions are great if you have a modern computer with high-speed access. But think of how much communication happens over cell-phones these days. We would need pervasive free wi-fi and some kind of portable device that could run the secure app to protect ourselves from an abusive government.
I shudder to think what other information the government could get from cell phones over the cell phone networks... after all, these things have contacts, calendars, text messages. I can't believe that there aren't back doors built into phone OSes.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
As a libertarian, from what I read & see in the news every day the situation in the United States seems to quickly be getting intolerable. George Bush erroneously said that terrorists "hate our freedoms"; is his counterterrorism strategy then to take away those same freedoms so that there is no longer any reason to attack a downtrodden people? What I don't understand is why the majority of Americans are actually accepting flagrant erosions of their rights. Hasn't the situation gotten bad enough that a nation famously built on the principle of liberty would do something about this erosion of liberty? I suggest that Americans Escape to Canada, but not to abandon ship - this would only make matters worse - but to stand up for your rights.
Specifically, go to Montreal next year to attend the Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference. CFP is one of the longest-running conferences about the impact of technologies on society, and specifically on the ways your information can be used against you. This is only a couple of hours away from New York & most of the Northeastern USA. Attendance was really low at this year's Conference in Washington, DC, entitled "Life, Liberty & Digital Rights" despite the fact that the conference is more relevant to Americans than ever: after an opening speech by senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), panelists & speakers included Eric Lichtblau (who broke the story about current NSA wiretapping), James Bamford (aouthor of many books on the NSA), and Stewart Baker (of the Department of Homeland Security, who revealed that it's up to people to take care of themselves in times of crisis, and the government shouldn't be depended upon). The venerable TidBITS Macintosh mailing list has an excellent review of the conference last week, one which included topics such as Wiretapping Victims, DRM & Fair Use, Constitutionality of surveillance & privacy (and the state of these in the US, EU & Canada), E-Voting, the EFF & it's campaigns, Cell Phone Tracking, Advocacy (fighting for your rights), and a tour of the NSA itself. Don't just complain on Slashdot about attacks on your liberty, get educated and do something about it.
Hey, suppose Silicon Graphics goes under then emerges as "Silicon Glyphics", as in Silicon Hieroglyphics. I would immediately wonder if they'd gotten an NSA contract and a new lease on life....
(recoats tinfoil hat with cesium barium-strontide layer...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The President's response to this issue was an attack on whistle blowing. George W. Bush said "anytime sensitive intelligence is leaked, it hurts our fight against the enemy". You don't say Mr. President! Let's examine this statement a bit. So Mr. President, you're claiming that since Americans and terrorists now know there is a record of every phone number I've dialed then obviously the terrorists now will be a lot more careful when when using phones to communicate or stop using them altogether. This is obviously not good. We don't have any love for terrorists so this should've been kept secret.
Uhm,.., wait a second. How did I arrive at this conclusion? Wait..., I feel a thought coming..., it almost hurts. Here it is!
How can we trust this information will be used appropriately with no independent oversight and furthermore, is managed by human beings who are imperfect as a whole? This information can be used
1) Against political opponents
2) Dissenters
3) To make profitable business decisions
Given the power this information confers on whoever holds it, can we get anything more than a personal promise that this information will only be looked at to fight terrorism? The answer is not because this information will be managed and used by human beings. We shouldn't trust anybody with this power, not George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, republicans, democrats, not even the Pope. We need leadership that believes it is possible to effectively fight terrorism while protecting the rights of Americans.
I'll leave you with a few words from Republican Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions' response to this exploding story "We're in a war with terrorism. We're dealing with people that want to kill us."
Don't you almost feel dumber for being exposed to such trite statements?
Here are a few more...
George W. Bush said today "This program strictly targets al qaeda and their known affiliates. Al qaeda is our enemy and we want to know their plans."
Comments ---- Pay careful attention to his choice of words. Spefically when he says "This program strictly TARGETS al qaeda". I wonder why he didn't say "This program strictly AFFECTS al qaeda." Forgive us for ever doubting you George. If history has taught anything it's to always trust a government wants more power solely to help its citizens.
Republican Senator Jon Kyler said, "This is nuts, we are in a war and we've got to collect information on the enemy and you can't tell the enemy how you're going to do it."
-- Again, pay attention to the choice of words. He's technically correct. While collecting information on power brokers, CEOs, democratic politicians, and every day average citizens like you, I'm sure there is some possibility that information on a terrorist or two might be collected.
There were 4 planes (remember the movie that just now came out called "United 93") that were lost that day.
Don't forget the costs of those lost souls in what future contributions to our economy (who knows what they might have done over the course of their lives in their given fields). Not to mention their families and the changes in their lives (again, who knows what they might have done differently).
I'd also try to keep in mind how people (not just Americans, but all people) tend to be innumurate in that they don't see the extremely small chances of something like approx. 250,000,000 - 4,000 (the odds of being one of the 4,000 killed of the 250+ americans in the country or about 625,000 to 1 against). They see "what if you're one of the 4,000". So the cost of terrorism is more than lives, more than monetary. It includes a lessening of quality of life (living in fear vs. living without fear). That loss contributes to health, productivity, tolerance, trust, etc.
-dj
In other news, David Lightman has been taken back into custody..
From what I understand:
Basically, the ATF wanted a particular white separatist to act as an informer on a white supremacist group. They harassed him constantly after he refused, and eventually surrounded his house with several hundred agents. At one point during the hostilities, an FBI sniper shot one of the man's sons as well as his wife.
Eventually he surrendered and was brought to trial on several accounts, including the killing of one of the agents surrounding his house. It was decided that he had acted on self-defense during the killing; the only crime he was convicted of was missing a court date.
It was undoubtedly a massive slot-up, but there's debate about whether the killings were the fault of the sniper or the ATF itself.
Yeah, well, I wish you luck. But the fact is that you've already lost. Whether you're in the UK or the US, you're already living in an "elective dictatorship". Your fellow citizens didn't particularly care about preserving their freedom. They didn't make a fuss at the appropriate time, and now it is too late.
My advice would be to avoid getting involved in any type of protest action, keep your head down, and hope that you're not a member of one of the groups that the government singles out as "enemies of the state". Don't support them, sure, but don't go out of your way to make trouble, because it won't be long before making trouble will get you killed.
-- Anonymous Coward (a very appropriate name for me!)
US society is NOT fascist. This is self-evident in that you can claim that it is fascist without any worry at all of being dragged off in the middle of the night and being detained, tortured, and/or killed.
Second: Fascism is always descending on the US but it keeps landing on Europe.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
...you're not the only one. Take a look: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12729893/
t _d_eisenhower.html/
My political principles, if this were the 90s, would be a mix of Democrat and Republican and I would feel fairly comfortable labelling myself a liberterian and not sweating it. However, the things I liked about the Republicans, like fiscal responsibility, a strong military, and fierce protection of privacy, have all been thrown to the winds. Believe me, funneling billions of dollars into fat cat contractors and wearing down our servicemembers in conflict after conflict does not make a strong military. Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex, saying "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Eisenhower said a lot of smart stuff, check it out: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/dwigh
"Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America."
"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war."
"Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose."
"The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without."
"Only Americans can hurt America."
And a personal favorite,
"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."
Wish I'd been around for him.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
I know you were trolling, but I still want to help put an end to the myth that Indian women commit suicide by jumping on funeral pyres. They did, but they don't anymore.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Been happening since Clinton. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/5/11/10523 7.shtml?s=ic
Only thing new is that Bush is the President so it's somehow more objectionable to the leftist MSM
...but democracy alone does not make a society good.
All societies, when it really comes down to it, are ruled by the tyranny of the majority, which is what unchecked democracy is. Even a dictator only rules because the people find that it would be in their best interest - at least, their best short-term interest - not to overthrow him, because he could hurt them or some such if they did otherwise. You only get the "illusion" of things being otherwise when a sufficiently powerful majority is enlightened enough to respect the rights of minority groups and individuals, and to keep minority groups and individuals who are NOT so respectful from running all over the rights of others. Only when enough people uphold their responsibilities to respect and defend each other do you get a truly ethical society.
So yes, democracy "works", in the sense that the people get whatever most of them want. The problem is, people don't always want what is best for them. Even looking only at individuals, it's easy to find cases all around where people make decisions aiming only at some perceived short-term good and wind up losing even bigger in the long run. Amplify this across a whole population and you get situations like we have now... vast numbers of people terrified of "terrorists" and unduly paranoid (of the wrong people). They then demand or at least allow that changes be made in law, certain people be granted certain powers and allowed to run roughshod over various and sundry other people so that "we" can all be "safe" and "free". All the while, this sets up the stage for the later erosion of our security and liberty, even for those members of the majority who supported such changes.
It's just another case of people being shortsighted.
So yeah, democracy works, inasmuch as "we the people" get what "we" want... whether we like it or not, "we" asked for it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
From my understanding of it, the ATF simply didn't like Koresh and his group and wanted to take them out, even though they hadn't done anything to warrant it.
Well, apparently they had done something to warrant it, since the ATF had both a search warrant for the compound, and an arrest warrant for David Koresh. Blame the issuing judge if you want, but the ATF had the legal right to enter the compound.
Not to mention the Davidians held a significant amount of illegal arms (yes, even in Texas some weapons are illegal), and they were firing on agents who tried to enter the compound. Trying to enter legally, with a warrant, remember?
The adults in that compound deserved what they got. The tragedy is the children who died in the fire.
br>
No license is required to buy a gun. Where do you shop? Now, if you want to buy some explosives, (anything more than 1lb cans of black powder) you'll need a license.
I remember a few years ago when saying the govt would do something like this made you a conspiracy nut. These days turning on the news seems more like listening to the whackos and listening to conspiracy nuts seems to ring true and just scares the hell out of me. I'm fine with leaving the country because I obviously don't fit in with the majority but the questions is... where the hell can ya go...
"I guess I'm gonna fade into Bolivian."
Also, hasn't the NSA heard of VoIP and encryption? I mean, come on. If I was up to no good, and I even *suspected* that my calls might be monitored, wouldn't taking just a couple of simple precautions make this particular information gathering a tremendous waste of time and resources??
that's an awesome idea. more ppl should do this. too bad many of the /. crowd's phones don't exactly ring of the hook.
They're already there.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin
There's an article on Smash the Man (http://www.smashtheman.com/) that hints that this might be tied into recent mergers and acquisitions - in other words, you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.
Yeah, kind of like how that Pearl Harbor thing changed the American public's mind about getting involved in that "European War". Good thing most of the vessels shipped out a few hours beforehand.
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
When you are a person hell-bent on control and dictatorship, it's hard to be stopped when the people who have the power to stop someone won't step up. Hell, just yesterday I read that GW Bush was saying how wonderful a president Jeb Bush would make. The man that botched the Florida election in 2000, the man with ties to arguably the most powerful family in the country if not the world... With two Bushes we have seen at least 3 wars.
Very very nicely put together.
Um, didn't we become independent from England for such things as privacy, freedom, and most of all, NO MONARCHY!??!?!
Sorry, it's beginning to look that way to me:
Oligarchy: n. pl. oligarchies 1.a. Government by a few, especially by a small faction of persons or families. 1.b. Those making up such a government. 2. A state governed by a few persons.
Monarchy: n. pl. monarchies 1. Government by a monarch. 2. A state ruled or headed by a monarch. or: n : an autocracy governed by a monarch who usually inherits the authority
Hrm.... not a whole lot of difference there, if you ask me.
Jho
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
all ears, no brain
Check all the big one, the army joined the side of the citizens. The one I know for certain that had just the citizens fighting was the polish uprising at the end of WW2. They gave the germans a though fight BUT they were doomed to loose the moment it become clear the soviet army was not going to help them (nor the western armies for that matter).
Enjoy your false believe in the fact that owning a pistol keeps you free. An unarmed man shot down by the state is a freedom fighter. A man with a gun shot down by the state is a terrorist.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They exist. Today's PDA/cell phones are ridiculously overpowered. They would not have trouble with pretty much any modern encryption.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Article the sixth [Amendment IV]
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I George W. Bush hearby affirm by oath that Slashdot user scorp1us(235526) probably did something bad, and should be searched and examined by all means available.
-W
Why the hell not?
OK, I can understand why Rumsfeld shouldn't be fired, because Bush would appoint his successor, and it's the Bush administration which is the problem, not Rumsfeld specifically.
But, yes, Bush is a liar. In 2004, he said:
And, yes, Gonzales is a fascist in that he does the dirty work for a fascist administration. The Bush administration is all about big, authoritarian, central government buttressing and buttressed by relationships to large businesses. They assert repeatedly and publically that they can "legally" lock you up without trial (Jose Padilla), tap your phone without a warrant, torture you, and on, and on...
We have to take care for our sanity as a nation. We've reached the point where the truth sounds like conspiracy theories, and so speaking the truth prompts people to call you a kook. It's not that what you're saying is kooky, it's that the truth is so far-out.
The truth is that the President says he can lock you up without trial, and he has done it to a U.S. citizen detained in the U.S.
The truth is that the President reserves the right to torture you, regardless of international agreements or laws passed by congress.
The truth is that the President says he can tap your phone without a court order.
None of the above is arguable. Bush has made all of these statements publicly (well, the torture thing was in a signing statement).
And the ironic thing is, the closer you look - the more introspection you do - the more difficult it is to say what is good for yourself. If you actually feel your upsetness and consider why you're upset about things, rather than immediately fighting any emotion you don't like (which is what most people do most of the time, I believe), you realize that what feels so real to you now is merely something you believe because someone pounded it into your head as a child. And every time you do this - every time you take a piece out of that armor you wear every day - you get a glimpse of what life is like when lived naturally. And that life is a life without fighting, yet without fear. It's a life where, usually, compassion simply means understanding and not interfering. You realize that the desire to control things is simply your childhood fear of abandonment and abuse, and that there is no way you can control anything. And that's infinitely okay, because you also realize that life, lived naturally, is love. Being the President changes none of this. He does bad things because he's screwed up. It's as simple as that. Just like any one of us, when he hurts people, he does it out of fear and misunderstanding. And just like any of us, he's doing the best he believes he can. But I don't want him in office. I want someone who understands what life is about.
I think you hit the nail on the head prell. First of all, the bolded part. I think you *completely* defined and described what is wrong with me, in my head, and why it is so hard to reconcile and straighten things out. You see, I was raised by a single dad who was a firefighter, then a recruiter of doctors for the Air Force. Flew Pararescue in Vietnam, brought back an AFB from a tornado strike, everything. And we won't go into the wonders my grandparents did. But you know, he drilled into my head, God, Country, Honor, Duty. And NOWHERE DO I SEE THOSE THINGS TODAY! What is WRONG with these people who are supposed to be leading our country?? The things that I was taught and learned as a child, they simply don't apply.
And you look at children today, and they don't care. All they care about is the next big entertaining distraction. Do you know how many people watched American Idol last night? FULLY 1/2 OF THE VOTING POPULACE!!!! (IE: ~75 million people voted in 2004 - AI had over 36 million viewers each night this week) Then take on the Hollywood tabloids, the constant fight for attention between gaming consoles, RIAA, MPAA, and all of the others. Almost makes you think there's a conspiracy going in when you look at the NEA dumbing down the schools. Do you know that 2 Filipina girls I know that are going to a school here in SD County DO NOT HAVE TO TAKE GOVERNMENT OR PHYSICS?!?!?! I swear to God the things my grandfather forecast are all coming true. All the young ones who are coming up into the world today don't give a crap, as long as they think everything is alright. That, to me, is 60% of the problem we face right there. Just be a sheep.... just follow the leader, we don't really blind you, we just show you what we want you to see.
What makes me so angry, is that I *am* a Conservative at heart. I *AM* a Republican, through and through (yes, you can blame Alex P. Keaton) - yet, the government right now is supposed to be reflecting the views of those that voted them in, and all they are doing is shitting all over us. I tentatively supported Bush in 2004 because I *HATE* Kerry. Said pararescue father was spit on by him in '72. I ain't saying that the Dems are bad, either. I'm just saying that there isn't *ANYONE* good in Washington DC! And like any of US are going to run with all of the data collection and spying that everyone has the ability to do. I considered a run for Congress, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. Uh, no. I have *WAY* too many skeletons that would be thrown out on to the wolves... and these days, there's no telling what would show up.
Government should be about teamwork. And teamwork is never a
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
No, sir, you're the one who is wrong. (I won't be so impolite as to point out that you're a moron, mainly for the reason that you brought ad hominem attacks into this thread.)
The communist party of the 1950's in the US was in part supported by the Soviet Union. It's membership was secret, and membership involved swearing allegiance to a foreign government.
It's not illegal to advocate the overthrow of capitalism -- but that's not what the communist party was about. McCarthy was wrong in his witch hunt, blacklists, and so forth; but the real shame is that the important point about communists in the US during the 1950's is glossed over or not addressed at all when this part of history is taught in US schools. I blame this on the fact that most of the people McCarthy hurt were intellectuals, and so intellectuals (many of whom in education have far leftist leanings to begin with) will author a single sentence if it would seem to mollify McCarthy's arguments.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I'm still safe. The administration is too lazy to get a warrant. And FISA court does not apply to me, so they'd need a REAL warrant.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
We may not like it but let's deal with the facts. FISA applies to "peace-time" but not to "war-time". Debate all you want about whether we're at War or not, and whether Congress abdicated its responsibility on that, but a panel of Secret Court judges found the current efforts to be consitutional under war powers provisions. Roosevelt did the same thing (adjusted for technology levels of course).
This isn't to say that's how America ought to be architected, but we need to grab reality by the horns if we're going to get things changed. Pretending it's illegal and calling for impeachment isn't going to accomplish those goals.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The last sentence should read...
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Why the hell not?
:)
That's a fair question.
Let me put it this way: the debate over really important and substantive issues of policy is too critical to let it get hijacked by partisan buffoonery. When I see something which I feel to be obviously, factually, verifiably, empirically true, and someone says "you're only saying that because you're [male | white | a jew | well-off | poor | straight | liberal | nuts]," it makes me want to tear what little hair I have left, out.
So you can tell when I feel strongly about something because I do my best to drop anything that might be considered inflammatory speech and try to let the facts speak for themselves. (I also note that it worked: when amightywind responded to me, he did so by imputing things to me that I didn't say, presumably because he thought it might discredit me. I didn't even get close to saying those things, so there's nothing to argue.)
Well, I am. I'm not proud of the bloviating in the inept media, and I'm not proud of the fact that people don't work to understand the news. I'm not proud that many people, like you, are angry about things which are patently false. But I'm proud to live in a country that allows all those things.
That's simply wrong. Most of the Haliburton contract monies are flowing through a contract that Haliburton competed for long ago, won when in the original procurement, lost to Dyncorp in the follow-on recompete, and then won back in the next contract period. All before Iraq. Before 9-11, even. But you are free to remain ignorant of this. ("LOGCAP" is the name of that contract, and it has been held up as a model for how to handle unforseen future need.)
That Halliburton's subsidiary is performing this work well and at a very low price is not in dispute; Indeed KBR (the subsidiary) is making so little money on this that Halliburton is looking to sell the division, because the shareholders dislike the very low profit.
The "no-bid" contract, with which the main contract is conflated (sometimes for political purposes) is "Restore Iraqi Oil." In order to plan for putting out the predicted oil-well fires, and to stop oil spills and restore oil production, the Defense department put in place a no-bid contract before going to war. (This was done partly in response to what the DoD learned in Kuwait; the government was criticized then for not having forseen the need to contract for such services before the war started.) Though many loudly criticize this to score political points, there are very good and valid reasons to let no-bid (actually, "sole-source") contracts. Haliburton was judged to be the only company with the expertise, experience, staffing, and required security clearances to do the job. And despite the public chestbeating on the matter, no credible disputes have ever been raised on that point. You simply cannot put out for bid a contract which will reveal war plans. There are mechanisms in place to get the best possible price even in that circumstance. Those mechanisms are pre-bid IDIQ contracts (Indefinite Delivery for an Indefinite Quantity) and sole-sourcing. That's what was done, and it was prudent and correct to do so.
People who both closely follow and understand US Government contracting know this. I talk to many of them, of all political stripes, and I have not found one, even one, who thinks anything untoward happened in the award of RIO. I am not saying that either contract is perfect or flawless. But nobody I know, even staunch democrats, has stated a belief that these were bad contracting decisions, or that Dick Cheney affected the contract award.
Well, I suppose I'll need a bit more information before I will believe that such laws exist. What are your sources? I'm willing to research it and decide if I believe it, but I don't know what you mean.
If /., NY Times, and Washinton Post represent the full spectrum of your news world, then you're seeing a world painted all the same color. (I was working the "spectrum" analogy there, in case it was too clumsy to be clear.) I would generally expect WP to be left, NY Times to be left of that, and /. to be very left of the Times.
I can't figure out for the life of me why all the Republicans I knew in the 90s who were vehemently opposed to government intrusion into people's private lives are so very fucking eager to open the doors now.
Because they were afraid of gun control, secularism in schools and government, the growth of welfare and taxation, and (oddly enough) the government giving permission to other people to do things that they considered an intrustion in their way of life.
Now that much of that no longer a concern for them, and the government is focusing on cracking down on peace activists and on terrorists and foreigners in general, the government is out of their lives. That's all they care about. They've never cared about the government's involvement in other people's lives unless it was enabling other people to do things that offended them.
They don't care about civil rights they aren't really using, and none of the NSA excesses will make them blink. I've honestly had an argument with a friend who asked why we felt we had a right to try to take away his right to security. Nothing I could say would convince him that he's not being made safer by these actions and that the rights of people targetted by the government were important too.
The only reason they're moving against Bush now is because of the failure of FEMA in New Orleans, the potential for losing another war abroad, and other acts of incompetence that have placed the stink of failure on the President. Only fear of being associated with a loser makes them reject him now.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
So, just as all left thinking folk started adding words like impeach, nuclear, and patriot to their signatures to overload the email skimmers, do we need random autodialers in every home to make random-length calls to random phones to add to the records?
And where do I get an answerer that answers the random calls without bothering me?
sorry -- i posted to the wrong story. me bad.
Sammybaby pwnz amightywind for teh win!
- Sig files: contemptibly familiar the second time around.
I know all this now, it's why my political alignment got very solidly pushed to "progressive". I don't want the government intruding into anyone's private life. I want to own a gun, and I want that nice gay couple down the street to be able to get married, and I want grandmothers to be able to protest war without getting carted off to jail. That's the world I want. If I absolutely have to pay taxes, I want to be reasonably certain that the money is being used well.
I also want secularism in schools. I believe there should be a world religions class taught. I believe that should be the extent of it. No Intelligent Design, no Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. If students want to pray, if they want to form a religious club, I think they should be able to, but no group should be favored over another. I want to see a Christian after-school club, and a Wiccan after-school club, and a D&D after-school club, and a GLBT after-school club, and a Young Republicans after-school club, and I want them all to get the same level of support from their school, and I want them all to exist free of being protested by nosy parents who don't want their kids exposed to "something like that". That's what I want. I don't want Bibles banned in school any more then I want clothing with pentagrams on it banned from schools.
The problem is that so many people who say they want equality mean that they want everything for their group and to take the rights away from other groups.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/domestic_spying;_ylt=Al
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Thu May 11, 6:59 AM ET
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.
Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December. He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance.
"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," said Hinchey.
In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of its own agency's lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.
Bush's decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program's legal justification.
The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA's activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terror network.
Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.
___
On the Net:
Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility: http://www.usdoj.gov/opr/index.html [usdoj.gov]
National Security Agency: http://www.nsa.gov/home_html.cfm [nsa.gov]
I think I will be switching back to the good old post office again. Slower but imagine all the junk mail they sort through.
I like this part in the Slashdot submission which no one seems to be commenting on:
... uh ..... questioning, that it just questioning, don't mind the East Europen guy over their with the electrodes.
"The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear."
I figured Slashdot readers were smarter than this.
The usefulness is obvious. Whenever you identify someone as a "person of interest" (i.e. a suspect with a reservation in his name at a secret East Europen prison and ticket in his name on Air Rendition) you immediately look up everyone who has ever called him and he has ever called. You eliminate all the 1-900 calls, calls to his mom and time spent talking to automated tech support lines. All the individuals left are then branded as suspects too, guilty until proven innocent, guilt through association. Of course these new suspects can't prove their innocence since they don't know they are a suspect and there is no court in the loop, thanks to George W. Bush, to insure there is probable cause to suspect them of something and to scrutinize them further.
You then walk the branches of the network and brand as suspects all the people who have talked to the 2nd layer in the network, and then the 3rd, and iterate. Needless to say the further out you get the less weight there is on the suspicion unless this calling tree intersects with another network of another "person of interest" at which point someone in the NSA yells "Eureka, I found it, a terrorist network". At this point presumably the Rendition team warms up their jet, puts on their black ninja gear and starts rounding people up, for
The beauty of computers is you can search for all kinds of correlations and linkages in these calling networks and who knows you might actually spot a terrorist. But you are somewhat more likely to violate the rights of and lay suspicion on lots of innocence people without cause. Or maybe you will just inundate yourself with information and false alarms and never catch the next 9/11 just before it happens.
It would be damn useful if instead of just recording the source and destination of every call made if you could also record the call so you could go back and see if they were plotting. This is probably the plan but they need more storage capacity and bandwidth.
@de_machina
Screw the fascist peeping toms... Thanx to my Asterisk Phone system, they can certainly try to tap my phone. For starters, my PSTN gateway provider is not even IN the USA. I have one provider for incoming (which they can tap - but it would be horribly expensive to do), and one for outgoing. Not only that, but I only pay appox $10/month. I get free outgoing and incoming and flat rate dialing to over 18 countries. It costs me no more to call China then it does to call my neighbor. I have a local incoming line (not provided by any American phone company).
For cellular service My provider is German, but offers service to the USA. I call my trusty Asterisk Cell phone gateway, to all the call records go to my own incoming number. My gateway bridges my calls through any of about 6 PSTN gateways, none operating in the US.
So - with a little intuition, one can still protect their privacy, but it's getting harder and harder each day as our country is going to hell in a hand basket. We COULD reverse that in Nov if people would start studying their candidates for office and make wize decisions, but I suppose if there are such a huge supply of clueless people out there going "click crazy" getting their puters infected and joining one of the thousands of botnets out there, then we are never going to vote in the right candidate.
Slashdot readers, more than just about anyone else, understand why the EFF's work is so important. YRO, right?
Got Encryption?
Like that the Supreme Court upheld Betamax?
Like your Broadcast-flag-free gear?
The EFF is insurance- they're there to actually understand the technical details of why the DMCA takedown letter you just got is unconstitutional, for example. But most Slashdot members haven't joined the EFF. Change that- Join the EFF today
Yes, really. Slashdot has members in the high-hundred-thousands or low-millions. The EFF has nowhere near even 1/30th or 1/40th of that many members. 39 of 40 Slashdot members are relying on the donations of that 40th member to keep the EFF going.
Did you like that the Communications Decency Act got killed?
Remember how quickly Sony got slammed for their rootkit?
Remember how long it took for non-technical people to understand how damaging the rootkit was? That's part of why the EFF is so important- they understand why the technical details matter so that they're ready when you call. But a small non-profit member-based organization depends on money from their members to run.
I just phoned Cingular to give them a chance to share their side of the story. The Customer Service rep had been provided an e-mail addressing the article and with some sort of scripted response: "Cingular cannot comment on matters of national security. Cingular is committed to its customers privacy."
I wasn't happy with that and asked to speak to someone a bit higher up the food chain. I was passed to someone in the 'Management Team' who parroted the same response. I commented that my contract with Cingular prevents them from sharing my information without my consent or a warrant. Mr. Management Team wouldn't tell me if they had been given a warrant or not, but it was pretty clear in our conversation that at least some records had been shared.
Interestingly, the CustSvc rep said that I was the first person she had heard from about this issue. If we want any critical mass on this, we need to make some noise, people. If there are any lawyers out there, are there any grounds here for a civil claim or small claim or SOMETHING? Even if I won $5k against them in small claims court, I could parlay that into a media relations nightmare for them.
I'm getting ready to cancel all of my AT&T/Cingular accounts now. Maybe I'll go with Vonage.
-M
Too bad I can't get a landline through them here, but when we go VOIP I'll be going with Qwest because they refuse to engage in illegal covert activities with the NSA. Why the hell the government is engaging in this process when there are already procedures in place for dealing with likely terrorist suspects (e.g., warrants, probable cause) is quite beyond me, unless it's exactly what our forefathers set our inalienable-yet-lost rights in the fourth, second, and first amendments to the Constitution of The united States of America, e.g,, tyranny.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Emotive rhetoric is not all that badly executed, but transparent straw men and ad hominem attacks in the face of reasoned debate leave you looking just too desperate. The actual stances the two of you adopt almost don't matter, given the gap in the quality of your arguments.
That's a good one. As if one you liberal archea have neurons sufficient comprehend a serious argument when one comes your way.
an ill wind that blows no good
Why am I not surprised. It's been known for years that people who buy pre-pay cell phones from some unknown vendor can be tracked as easily as old Grandma who has had same phone number for 30 years.
All they needed to complete their little "Big Brother" system was a database, and one what would allow them to "Back track" from some future incident, in the case the feds may stumble upon a ditched cell phone, or it's number may have been known by one of their friends who's been tracked.
It's certainly reasonable to assume this vast database does not contain the content of your conversation, but at a later time they can still get it, but up until recently, finding this data has been very problematic. Now, no longer a problem.
This way, they can abide by the law, obtain their warrent to learn contents of the conversation, because it has already been recorded somewhere far far away, but not accessable until you know the exact time and call details of the call. Now, they can find it. Take their time in finding OBL (Assuming of course he is stupid enough to even use a phone), or whoever.
So, in a sense, your privacy is SORT OFF protected, and if you don't show up on their radar, then you don't have anything to worry about. We just don't know the frequency of their radar, thats all.
It would be really cool of someone would figure out what their "Frequency" is. IE: By what creteria would one wind up showing on their radar.
Always pays to be careful folks.
Can you hear me now?
What?
Whatever happened to "Give me liberty or give me death!"? You slow-boild frogs that consider yourself "Americans" are fucking pathetic.
Now you just whine about in blogs. There isn't even any protests. Where is everyone filling the streets in Washington? Naw, y'all are having too much fun watching Survivor, or working too hard to buy your third SUV. Or more likely just wanking off to some internet pr0n. Buch of fucking pussies.
Look at what you have become. You pathetic losers deserve what you get. Don't go crying to other countries when your family members get dragged off to secret prison.
Even former Soviet countries like Ukraine are better off than you. When there is too much corruption there, people actually fill the streets until it's fixed. The only thing the USA has going for it is a good standard of living, and I have a news flash for you. It's dwindling away. Look where your dollar is going. It's never going back up, you know that right? In a decade, you guys will be fighting to cross the border into Canada or Mexico, just to get a damn job. Don't believe me? Keep doing what you are doing, and you will see.
Every time I read about a new abuse of civil rights in the USA, I think to myself "OMG that's awful, they're sure to fill the streets and kick the government out for that. It goes against everything their constitution stands for!" Then, I'm surprised when NOTHING HAPPENS. Except for a few whiners in blogs, that is.
I'm probably going to get modded down as a troll by some "patriot". I don't care. Sometimes your friends and neighbors in other countries have to stand up and have the balls to tell you when you're fucking up.
E
Why are we standing for this bullshit. Get out en masse and riot... This is OUR government. They need to be reminded of that apparently.
Looks like they finally pulled it off.
What?
But he did violate the agency's rules of engagement during the stand-off - well, probably. One of the really interesting things about the whole case is that the agents who arrived after the initial action, in which two deputies were killed, were lied to....
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Breakfast served all day!
The political strategy of Karl Rove, is to use the compliant media - absolutely DESPERATE for any kind of controversial story to sell ad space, increase revenue, to spread the word about any kind of dirt on the man everyone loves to hate; George W Bush.
Everyone loves to hate him, because he's a fuckup. And he's stinking filthy rich, never worked for it. The absolute antithesis of epicurianism. He drives liberals fucking crazy, because he's everything a liberal hates.
So he creates a little story about something related to something that Bush has done, only he makes it look illegal, when technically, due to some obscure loophole or conservative interpretation of law or the constitution, it's actually legal. And he calls up his buddies in the press, the Judy Millers, the Chris Mathews, etc. and says - hey, have I got a story for you - (or one of your more liberal friends in the same media organization) - however he gets it going.
What do you think "10 million phone conversations recorded a day" (oops, I mean 10 million pen-registers a day) means? It means that what Bush is doing - based on the PATRIOT ACT, is technically legal. The So-Called Liberal media has been swatting at Bush madly all day long, and pundits are furiously describing speeches he made where he talked about obeying the law wrt court orders and such. I'm certain that the timing of this story has something to do, as well, with the Goss resignation and Hayden appointment, given Hayden's stewardship of this NSA program. Too much coincidence.
So the point of all this is - Rove feints with a "fake" Bush is evil story. The Liberals scream and yell, and over react. They can't help it - they've been given incomplete, if not false information. It brews and bubbles for a few days, or weeks, or months, then the FULL story with all the facts get out, and the Liberals end up losing the argument, and looking like asses.
Remember Rathergate? We all thought we finally had the proof that Bush was a deserter. Until the proof turned out to be a forgery. Who forged it? (My guess: Rove) Where's the REAL evidence that he was or was not a deserter? (My guess: Shredded decades ago, duh!) What was the final outcome? (Dan Rather, Liberal media Icon resigns in disgrace - noone dares question Bush's military service ever again in serious public debate).
Remember Plamegate? Bush SAID he would fire the leaker. We were all hoping that that meant, Cheney would be fired, or Libby would be fired, or Karl Rove would be fired. Then after a very costly investigation, an indictment which is explained away as "bad memory" (remember Iran-Contra?) and then the TRUTH finally comes out: BUSH is the leaker - because he de-classified Plame. Technically legal. The outcome? Bush still got his war, Libby's case will probably be dismissed, or he'll be pardoned - G.Gordon Liddy spent time behind bars for his Watergate Role, and he's making buttloads on the talk-show and book-signing circuit. And Liberals are "technically wrong" again, because technically, Bush didn't break the law.
This whole NSA scandal thing sounds exactly the same. Huge controversey made over a story that is changing every time we hear about it. Public debate rages over whether he has the right to do this (when "this" isn't even really defined yet), or whether we have a right to question during a "war", (whether or not you agree on the premise, execution, or whether we're technically at "war"). In the end, I'm afraid we're going to find out that what Bush is doing, is technically legal (or if it's illegal, those facts will never become known) - and that a lot of Liberal pundits, and moderate conservatives, or even hard conservatives who have lost faith, are going to look like chumps, and congress will end up even MORE impotent and irrelevant, and Bush will have more clout to do whatever he wants.
Some people think that this rove-a-dope tactic is a demonstration of Karl Rove's "evil genius". I disagree. People are gullible. They still trust the media. Th
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What the fuck is Qwest and how the fuck can I become a customer?
He's talking to you.
He's talking to all the slow-boiled blogwhiners on here who would do something serious and concrete to protest this, if only it didn't conflict with their next Counterstrike lanparty or pr0n wanking session.
Yes you.
Woo! You completely tore that guy a new asshole! In such a calm, efficient manner. You are like a ninja of arguments. As this wild, frothing, insane dude rushes you with his arms flailing all around, screaming incoherent jibberish, you calmly step aside and stab him in the kidney with a sword.
That was just beautiful to behold.
I'm in awe. I rarely use this "make person friend" feature of Slashdot, but I gotta use it in this case.
fifth sigma, inc.
Have you?
A) Written your congressman/senator?
B) Donated to ACLU and EFF?
C) Protested?
D) Played Counterstrike/watched survivor/wanked off to pr0n?
E) CmdrTaco
Dusty old non news.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
I am not a USian, but surely it should be clear to all USians that your president has overstepped the bounds of his office. He should be impeached.
meh
If we all call say 100 random numbers every day for a couple months, perhaps we could boat their servers.
What had to be done? koresh didn't even dop anything ilegal untill the atf showed up trying to kick the doors down,.
None of thier guns were ilegal. They had tax stamps for everything questionable. Yes, you too can purchase a tax stamp and own a fully automatic 30 or 50 cal machine gun. The atf was there because the sherif was worried that some of the guns were ilegal. They kicked in the doors and got shot for doing so.
The Republicans have already spyed on the Democrats once and NOTHING HAPPENED! Information from domestic spying is clearly being used by Republicans to defeat Democrats. Gathered information is being reviewed for use by the Rebublican party and then it's sanitized and passed on to the RNC.
This also happened during Whitewater and when Clinton was impeached. Ken Starr's office leaked like a sieve! A lot of deliberate lies were planted through Starr just to smear Clinton in the press. (Remember when it was reported the Clinton was involved in drug running and murder?) Contrast this with the Fiztgerald investigation of Rove. Not one leak. Fitzgerald is honest, not a politcal hit man. Also, During Whitewater, the public prosecutors conspired with the right wing funded civil suits, in clear violation of the law.
Now, is there the slightest doubt that the current, even more extreme adminstration is using terroism as an excuse to undermine their political opponents? You bet that they are wiretapping elected Democratic offficals to help win the next election. I wonder when they'll start planing fake evidence to make fron running Democrats look bad. The next step is poison, like the Russians used in the Ukrain. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/04/11/AR2006041101114.html Don't think it can't happen here.
*posting in an NSA database*
Did anyone comprehend the prevailing attitude for someone disassociating with ill behavior? Someone that questions the effectiveness of competancy of an idea or product, is referred immediatly to a solution that is outside the domain where the dispute occurred. As the earlier Post exhibited, his recommendation for a competant and independent way of life is to a vile country far away where such character is detrimental to whomever want to pool or consolidate their good nature with equal fellowship.
Whoever fake American would offer such insult, is using unequal weights and measures by not heeding their own advice. If there is no dissolving the trust and mandate abused by the misplaced government, then it all just revolved to an energy crisis of eminent domain to construct enormous damns and artificial neighborhoods of government housing.
without prejudice
Haven't seen you since K5!
Good to know you're still relentlessly pushing that special brand of the-lady-doth-protest-too-much "libertarianism" as a relentless cover for Republican apologetics!
Anyway, in answer to your question: No, of course there is no evidence of this story. The fact that USA Today, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have each independently laid down their credibility on the line by claiming multiple sources while outlining the program in excruciating detail (complete with details of who ran the program, exact dates of operation, and which carriers were involved) at a time when multiple civil court cases are currently progressing into this exact program, is clearly just evidence that these newspapers are all part of the LIBERAL MEDIA. We can thus be certain the entire thing is just a fabrication of LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS.
If the story were real the low-paid telecom jocks who leaked the classified information this story is founded on would have put their careers and livelihoods on the line (and faced essentially guaranteed jail time) by illegally going public with allegations against a presidential administration notorious for its smear-and-attack tactics on critics, at a time when that same administration is very publicly and clearly going on the warpath against "leakers". So no. There's nothing in it.
I'm glad you're so damned concerned about conditions here in the US. Since you in fact don't live here I'm amazed at how you can be so conversant about said conditions. Also, what country do you reside in? I'm sure you'll find that almost all of them have much more restrictive speech laws and more permissive search laws than the "fascistic" US.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
What else needs to be said?
"I did not have sexual relations with that data." - GW Bush
Yes, but can you have a sercure conversation with existing cell phone tech? Say you have a program that allows you to make secure calls -- who are you going to call? It's a question of market penetration.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Well said.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Use your head, their data mining and profiling with you tax and drug dollars.
"How dare you question our leader in a time of war? Go to North Korea and see if you like it better!
This is exactly the kind of stuff that makes the terrorists more powerful. All they're looking for is weakness in our resolve and people like you make it easy for them. You should be ashamed to call yourself American."
Damn trolls, I can't seen to resist them lately. Look if this is meant sarcasticly, QUIT IT, it's not funny anymore, this is serious stuff. If this is what you really think, well Mr A.C. it looks to me like you are ashamed of your own thoughts and words, with good reason though. Dumbass as they are.
This is exactly the kind of mindless drivel that supports a facist state. All these 'leaders' require is a tipping point of weak minded people like yourself to make it easy for them. YOU are the one that should be ashamed to call yourself American. If people like yourself continue to support such ideas your decendants will curse you as the mindless cowards that selfishly pissed away thier liberty, hopes and dreams. Please try a little self evaluation and reflection, ask your self what is the "stuff that matters". Then try, just try thinking for yourself for a change.
Matthew
If you always assume that the administration is lying and that things are much worse than you're being told, you will rarely be proven wrong. First Bush said it was only international calls, he was lying. Now they're saying it's only the phone numbers and time stamps
that they're collecting not the content of the call. Just for grins let's assume they're lying and see how much data we're talking about.
Assume:
1) 5 calls per day at five minutes per call.
2) All 400 million Americans do this so 200 million connections.
3) Phone bandwidth is 3kHz so a 6 kbps data stream is sufficient to accurately recreate the audio (without compression).
200 million x 5 x 5 x 6000 bits/second x 60 secs/minute = 1.8 quadrillion bits or 225 terabytes.
You can buy a terabyte drive (2x 500GB Maxtors) for less than $1000. This scenario would require about a quarter million dollars for storage.
Even if everyone spent 24hrs/day on the phone the cost for storing this data ($15M) is trivial for NSA's (black) budget.
Now consider that NSA has literally acres of computers under Ft. Meade to process this data with voice recognition and
hotword flagging so they probably don't need much more than a couple days worth of storage.
Sorting out the flagged audio with human interpreters is difficult but recording it is not.
I think there are a lot of people in my position, If I had it to do over again, I would have voted for Kerry, in hind-site, he doesnt look all that bad.
that said, I really think that the republicans and Dems are the same on this issue, the folks in power want as much information as possible, data is knoledge, knoledge is power; So I ask, would A Gore or Kerry whitehouse be any differant?
Wasn't there some GSM "exploit" at blackhat that allowed near-gsm datarate transmission using only acoustic coupling?