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NSA Had Domestic Call Monitoring Before 9/11?
MarkusQ writes "Bloomberg is reporting that, according to documents filed in the breach of privacy suit on behalf of Verizon and BellSouth, the NSA asked AT&T to set up its domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Could it be that they were intending to monitor domestic calls (and internet traffic) all along, and the 'Global War on Terror' was just a convenient excuse when they got caught?" From the article: "...an unnamed former employee of the AT&T unit provided them with evidence that the NSA approached the carrier with the proposed plan. Afran said he has seen the worker's log book and independently confirmed the source's participation in the project. He declined to identify the employee."
Oh shit.
"Could it be that they were intending to monitor domestic calls (and internet traffic) all along, and the 'Global War on Terror' was just a convenient excuse when they got caught?"
Of course the so-called "War on Terror" is just an excuse! Before the illegal
invasion of Iraq, no terrorist groups were based there, but look now! This
was widely expected to happen. So the current Administration has increased, not
reduced, the risk of Americans to be victims of terrorists.
Before the illegal invasion of Iraq
Illegal according to what law? You know that when they are attacking other countries they are not required to obey the laws in that country.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I'm not surprised at all..
Anyone who believe in "The land of the Free" have dipped to deep into the kool-aid.
When you give you president dictatorial powers and have no oversight and no way of getting rid of a president during his term, you have put yourself at risk. Add to that the ever increasing polarization of the politics in this country and you'll understand that there are no difference between a one-party state and a two-party state.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I would only hope the government is trying to see who the bad guys are calling.
Evidently, every law abiding citizen in the United States.
May the Maths Be with you!
The operation was legal? The operation was planned because its not to much of a stretch from other operations from the last 30 years?
Instead of gasping about how they *planned to do this horrible thing* even *before* 9/11 like a little school girl you should go out and work on the political side that made this even possible. Instead of railing against Bush for using the tools at his disposal you should work on modifying those tools.
When you give you president dictatorial powers and have no oversight and no way of getting rid of a president during his term, you have put yourself at risk. Add to that the ever increasing polarization of the politics in this country and you'll understand that there are no difference between a one-party state and a two-party state.
I have to disagree with that argument: In recent memory, government worked fairly well (not great, but relatively sane) when 2 parties held control of a branch of government (Reagan vs Democratic Congress, Clinton vs Republican Congress), and sucked when a single party controlled all branches of government (George W Bush, Carter). The reason for this phenomenon seems pretty obvious to me: When one party controls all branches of government, the Constitutional checks and balances are ineffective because everyone with the power to stop a branch of government is part of the same organization. In other words, there's really one-party rule going on, even if it's officially a two-party system.
That can lead to a lot of the polarization you're worried about. If one side can't be heard except by screaming as loudly as possible in public, that's exactly what they're going to do, and the other side will start screaming to drown out the screaming of the group not in power. Hence a shrill political debate, and increased polarization as politicians take more extreme positions in order to get noticed.
I am officially gone from
I hope you do feel safe while the last of your freedoms is taken from you. Freedom of speach this is. The real reason for such monitoring is to supress political dissent. You see a monitored populace is a complient one.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Yeah, because before 9-11, terrorism was completely unknown in the United States. Its not like anyone had ever tried to detonate a bomb in the parking garage of the world trade center, or someone had tried to blow up the Federal Builing in Oklahoma City (ok, so since that was entirely domestic this program wouldn't have helped there, but you get the point).
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
"The truth is that these programs have been going on for years but none of you cared."
So it's OK if he just adds to the pile?
When I saw the headline I myself thought that meant the program was enacted during the Clinton administration, but with the date of February 2001 it seems Bush had been in office for less than a month and already his administration is trying to expand executive power, with no other excuse beyond the one that has become so clear in the years sense: his belief that the executive always had this power.
"Clinton did it too" is not a valid excuse.
The flaw is even worse than you think, because it can't be remedied through "proper" voting. No matter what your political affiliation, you have no choice but re-electing a caste of professional politicians, which differ only on superficial and relatively inconsequential issues like a constitutional amendment explicitly banning gay flag-burning.
Vote for minor party? Only if you want to throw away your vote, for the complete lack of enforcement of gerrymandering laws means even the most incompetent of incumbents win over 90% of the time. Even the recent supreme court ruling tacitly condoned it by only complaining about instances of potential racial gerrymandering. Apparently, cheating is fine, as long as you aren't a bigot when you do it.
Spread the word? Anything you say can be countered by a bombardment of disinformation and distractions that prevent effective dissent. One would think that the alternative media/internet get around this, and it can--but they're going to change that. Plans for complete regulation of the internet are already in the works under the guise of "tiered-service". As John Devorak says, we're in the golden age of the internet--enjoy it while it lasts, because it's soon to end.
-Grym
ok, so since that was entirely domestic this program wouldn't have helped there, but you get the point).
/. I'm too lazy to RTFA, but the headline says "domestic call monitoring". Why would you then conclude that it would be ineffective against domestic terrorism but effective against international terrorism?
Well, since this is
Anyway, 'terrorism' (both domestic and Islamic) weren't a significant problem before 9-11 and they aren't a significant problem today, despite what the 6 o'clock news wants you to believe. Murder takes the lives of many more people (as in several orders of magnitude) per year. Suicide takes 4x more than murder, and car accidents take over 5x more. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and smoking-related respitory diseases together claim over 200x the lives that murder claims (which is itself claims several orders of magnitude more lives than terrorism.)
In terms of human lives, terrorism in America isn't even a blip on the radar. It certainly doesn't justify the expenditure of trillions of dollars on wars and "Homeland Security", nor does it justify the wholesale slaughter of our freedoms and even if it did a domestic call tracking program would do jack shit. Despite what the pundits want you to believe, there is no vast centralized network of terrorists. They have no need to keep in constant contact with each other over long distances, and ruthlessly and indiscriminately monitoring law-abiding American citizens (incidentally, none of the 9-11 terrorists were American citizens) will give us nothing but another step towards a police state.
Who is "he", and how is maintaining the status quo "adding to the pile"?
It seems to me that our monitoring programs have actually shrunk in the last six years or so due to the massive increase in data that there is to monitor. When we were debating Echelon in the '90s, why do you think the NSA wasn't already doing it? Do you think the NSA funded all that Linux performance and scalability work they did out of the kindness of their hearts?
The reason we're finding out about this now instead of ten years ago is that for the first time since, well, pretty much ever, the vast majority of journalists and government employees don't like the current administration, and are working extra hard to dig up dirt.
And the answer is "no". Any system will have "false positives", "false negatives", "true positives" and "true negatives".
The "false negatives" mean you miss a plot. As long as the false negative rate is above a certain percentage of the actual plots, it will work.
More problematic is the "false positive" rate. This is when a non-plot is identified as a plot. Innocent people are investigated. This takes time / money / effort.
Given that there is an upper limit on the time / money / effort available, the government will waste resources chasing false leads.
People who do not understand that will look at the extreme rarity of "terrorist attacks" in the US (try to name 5 attacks in the US in the last 100 years without using Google) and conclude that the time / money / effort spent was successful.
However, looking at the budget, you will see that our government is BORROWING the money.
We are going bankrupt in an attempt to chase down a threat that kills fewer people every year than car accidents.
And we are surrending the Rights that our forefathers were willing to give THEIR lives for.
So they had monitoring before 9/11, too? Wow it was really effective. Let's put some more time and energy into wiretapping and monitoring of the American people because it's provent to be so effective up to this point. Not to mention 100% legal.
Kofi Annan ... In some parts of the world, leaders lead from a position of moral authority
And it's exactly Kofi Annan's willingness to treat despots and terrorists with the same deference that he reserves for the elected governments of democracies that strips him of any moral authority. It's his completely luke-warm, moreally rudderless handling of stunning UN-facilitated corruption in things like the Iraq oil-for-food program that indicate what a moral relativist he is. It's not "moral authority," it's classic, ineffectual political correctness writ larger than any warm-and-fuzzy campus activist could ever hope.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"Old news" that Bush is spying on us, while he lies about it, and continues to do it, is still NEWS. Important news. Stuff that matters.
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make install -not war
- Any similarities to NKVD recruiting blanket all operators in some telephone exchanges in the 30-es and having a call record copy of all calls are mere coincidence, nothing to see, move along.
- Any similarities to another character that used to say "Who is not with us is against us" with a thick southern accent are mere coincidence, nothing to see, move along (before modding that as a flamebait, ask any Russian speaker for an English translation of Koba perls of wisdom. And fear the result).
- Any similarities between the Guantanamo military tribunal formula and the military tribunals under chapter 58 of the USSR criminal codex are mere coincidence, nothing to see, move along (before modding that as a flamebait, read the relevant article and compare the required standards of evidence, right of attorney and defence and number of criteria for magistrate selection in both)
- Any similarities between al Qaeda and the fictional enemy of the state all encompassing organisation The Trust are mere coincidence, nothing to see, move along.
- Any similarities between the names of Gulag, Gulagantanamo and Guantanamo are mere coincidence, nothing to see, move along.
- Any similarities...
As one great American thinker of the beginning of this century used to say: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.b>Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
us, they want to control us. They are trying very hard to speed up this totaltarianism. They want all the power and control over the people. George Bush's fair voting act is putting in place electronic voting machines in every state, its now illegal to whistleblow that a Diebold voting machine is hackable and could be used to fix an election. Haliburton got a $400 million contract to build Federal "Detention Centers" right after the 2000 election. Hundreds of thousands new federal beds that are currently setting empty while the prison system is overflowing. Couple that with things like spying on the polulace, it is starting to paint a very scary picture. WAKE UP. ITS NOT A BAD DREAM
So, it is arguable that our freedoms have always been under attack both from within and without, that is by domestic terrorist, non-domestic terrorist, and corrupt government officials. All these persons wish to limit out freedoms for various reasons, but in the end to maximize personal power.
There were probably dozens of programs on the table that would not fly pre-9/11. For example, number of reports indicate that Bush and others worked out a plan to invade Iraq, even before bush was elected. What 9/11 acheived, to the terrorists delight, was create a political climate in which the protections fo the constitution could be roled back, and Bush could be the closest thing to a dictator that we ever had. Remember, he is claiming the right to do anything to prisoners, even without the consent of congress. The way he is treating prisoners seems very much like the spanish inquisition.
And the terrosists are happy. The operations in Iraw are giving them first hand experience in how to dispatch the US. All of our tricks and technology are continously thwarted not only by terrorist ingenuity, but American selfishness. Whose idea was it to use a civilian unarmored transport as a military carrier, when a military carrier was available, and then hack armour on the military carrier which makes it so unstable as to put the gunman at extreme risk. Iraq has shown the terrorist our vunerabilities. Instead of fixes the vunerabilities, the admistration has gone to full blown security through obscurity and threatened the media. There again we have a freedom being threatened that government wishes they could control.
In the end we have officials that are greedy and want to cut coners. Most of the time we can keep them in check, and for the most part we are keeping them in check. Lay who only wants white people to have a vote is in deep trouble. The problem is we now have an opening, due to a president that truly believes big governement is answer, just look a the budget, the added department of homeland security, the added security forces,. and the people cannot be trusted.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
We will now see Bush's media flacks spinning his bottomless hunger for spying on Americans by saying that "if we had gotten this program before 9/11/2001, we would have had what we needed to stop those terrorists".
Even though we of course had more than enough info and spying programs to catch and stop them. The FBI tried to stop the hijackers in flight school, but the FBI refused to act. One FBI whistleblower has been gagged for years because she's tried to tell too much about how badly broken is our counterterrorism system. Amidst mountains of intelligence, Bush has been unable to even find Bin Laden for longer than it took FDR and Truman to beat Germany and Japan in WWII.
We don't need more mountains of intelligence, especially spying on every American's every transaction. We need regime change to one that will actually protect us, the way we elected them and pay them to do. Every threat we've faced - terrorists, recession, hurricane, and smaller - has been bungled or worse by the Bush regime. Giving them more power is like giving the school bully a gun. They'll just pistol whip everyone to make stealing our lunch money that much more efficient.
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make install -not war
That is a very good question.
Some weird stuff has happened in this country over the last 10 years, the strangest of them all is that the Republican Party now is entirely controlled by a gang of socialist thugs. I don't know how that happened, but the Republican party is now the party that stands for big government spending:
I don't have any other way to describe this than good old, Soviet-style, socialism and cronyism. If this had been the current administration only, I would have been able to understand it as a fluke, but it is not. It is almost every single republican senator and representative. They have all joined the party, and they are all behaving like good, old socialist thugs. How on earth did the Repulican party become a socialist institution? Someone needs to write a book about this transformation.
What can we do about it? I am not sure. We have the right to vote. It seems every non-republican politician today, even lunatics like Howard Dean, are more capitalists and more "Republican" than any current RINO in DC. I guess the answer is that we have to vote non-republican in the future. At least until normality has been restored in the Republican party.
It seems that if you are someone who likes lower taxes, smaller government, less socialism, you have no choice but to vote non-Republican. It is just plain weird. Even a vote for the Democrats would be a vote for lower taxes and smaller government. Utterly strange.
So, yeah, vote. And only vote for the republicans if you think that Stalin was a good idea.
And, of course, Osama still lurks in the shadows untouched, the perfect foil to our "strong" leader.
"Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy ... [sic] censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything --you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
So you say. Even if true, it hardly changes the point. Your "points" are incredibly dishonest and biased.
I blame Bush for what he has done. Seems pretty simple and straight forward. You want to give him a pass, and your reasoning for that is absolutely nonsense, based on blaming Clinton or some such.
Since you apparently can't read, I'll re-post part of my last replay: "If there was any evidence they were ever spying inside the country (insane crackpots need not apply)..."
I didn't say anything about it being okay or not. It is, however, LEGAL for them to do so. Meanwhile, spying inside the US is strictly illegal, and Bush has broken the law by doing so.
I realize you don't like facts, but you can't make up nonsense or rant on some other topic to refute them.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
They're only building permanent bases depending on your definition of "permanent."
Some weird stuff has happened in this country over the last 10 years, the strangest of them all is that the Republican Party now is entirely controlled by a gang of socialist thugs. I don't know how that happened, but the Republican party is now the party that stands for big government spending:
How on earth did the Repulican party become a socialist institution?
Well, in the first place, it's not socialism, it's fascism.
It's been longer than 10 years. It really started going into overdrive with Reagan, but the roots go back to WW2. Most people forget that the wealthy elite, industrialists and the like (i.e. the Republican base) were tremendous supporters of the european fascists. It was only the American left (when we had one) that supported going to war against them. Most Americans were isolationist and didn't want to get involved either way. Heck, our current president's grandfather actively supported Germany against his own country. He narrowly avoided treason prosecution. It's nice to have friends in high places.
After WW2, an unholy alliance was created between Christians and Republicans for the first time in history due to the threat of the "godless communists". The rural Christians have continually voted against theior own stated "moral values" since this time. That's why you see them frothing at the mouth about sex on TV and gays being presented in a positive light even though those are inevitable consequences of hyper capitalism which is what they keep voting for. Tie that in with the fact that rural America has never dealt with the negative effects of capitalism until recently as they have lived under a form of socialism for a hundred years where the people in the cities are forced to subsidise their way of life.
Since Reagan with all the crimes of his administration including arming terrorists, creating torture schools and aiding the international cocaine trade, it's gone into high gear.
Someone needs to write a book about this transformation.
Not a book, but a couple of long, well researched articles are right here:
First a primer on what fascism is and how it came about in Europe
Then an analysis of the rise of fascism in America.
There are a lot of other very well reearched articles on that site as well ranging over a variety of topics.