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NID Admits ATT/Verizon Help With Wiretaps
Unlikely_Hero writes "National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has confirmed in an interview with the El Paso Times that AT&T and Verizon have both been helping the Bush Administration conduct wiretaps. He also claims that only 100 Americans are under surveilance, that it takes 200 hours to assemble a FISA warrant on a telephone number and suggests that companies like AT&T and Verizon that "cooperate" with the Administration should be granted immunity from the lawsuits they currently face regarding the issue."
The President grants executive powers to do what he wants. Seriously though, it shouldn't even really be one U.S. citizen that they do this with. When does the fear mongering to get broad reaching government powers end? I'm so damned tired of it, and this country has slid so far downhill in the last 5 or so years due to it. Just about every other nation looks at the U.S. in a bad light these days because we're prudish, invasive, annoying, and hipocritical. I'm getting to the point where I want to purge the entire administration from the lowest congressman all the way up and start over. Take out the special interest groups, no corporate sponsorships for campaigns, and get rid of the all the harpy lobbyists. I'm just so sick of it.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
There's a reason it takes over 200 hours to assemble what you need to get a wiretap warrant. Due proccess is meant to insure that honest people have privacy preserved, and that the resources we have are being focused on those who really are potentially criminial.
Is it perfect? No, probably not. But it's what we have setup now and short-cutting due process isn't the answer to finding a better way.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
This is ridiculous. It seems reasonable that shadowy international criminal figures assume that their conversations are being monitored. Presumably they know that they're targets of one of the world's most technologically advanced intelligence agencies. That's not even counting the fact that most recent incidents of terrorism have been homegrown, and as likely to be about abortion or good ol' anti-government paranoia as they are about U.S. support for Israel. If it's taking you 200 hours to get a warrant, Mike, then perhaps the government could find some wasted money that might be better spent fixing our overburdened legal system.
Every time the courts point out that the Constitution might have some bearing on this administration's actions, the "dead Americans" flag gets waved. Nothing new here.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Agreed. They're not doing 200 hours (or even 200 man-hours) of paperwork -- it shouldn't take a Master's Thesis to get a FISA warrant.
In fact, the admission that they have to spend an additional 200 hours gathering evidence is a clear admission of wrongdoing on their part. Our Constitution provides security against arbitrary searches and seizures; if it takes 200 additional hours to gather enough evidence to form a mere suspicion of wrongdoing, then the initial justification for the wiretap must be fairly flimsy.
Any Bush supporters out there? Ok, asking for a Bush supporter on Slashdot is probably like walking into a Microsoft board meeting and asking how many people run Linux. ;-)
Still, every time this subject comes up, I ask the same series of question and I have yet to get a reply from any Bush supporters (even when there are Bush supporters replying to the topic). The question is: Would you like the next administration to have unsupervised warrant-less wiretapping capabilities? What if the administration was run by Hillary Clinton? Would you trust her to use it properly and not abuse it.
Even if you ignore any current abuses of the system (as I'm sure Bush supporters do) and assume that Bush just has our best interests at heart, you can't say the same about the next administration. Or the one after that. To give any branch of government unchecked power is extremely dangerous. It's not a matter of *will* it be abused, but *when will* it be abused. That's why the Constitution set up 3 houses of power (Congress, President, Courts) and gave them the ability to check each other's power. (e.g. Congress can make a law, President can veto it, Congress can override the veto, Courts can strike it down, Congress can pass it as a Constitutional Amendment.) Unsupervised warrant-less wiretapping is unconstitutional and the only way it's being pushed forward is through major FUD. (Americans *WILL DIE* if you don't let us do whatever we want to do!!!!)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There is understandably a tremendous amount of misunderstanding by the American people about how collection targets are designated, and there is a large body of law that governs how the process must take place. While it is true that almost any transmission of data, voice or otherwise, through this country can be monitored, the sheer scale of daily communications quickly renders random sampling useless. Call records are not call recordings - can you imagine just how much storage would be required to save for posterity the billion or so phone conversations that happen each day in this country? Even running a simple query on a database containing recent activity (not the conversation, just the fact that a call happened) can take hours. It is simply not done, both for time and practicality reasons - and because collecting on a non-designated target is very highly illegal.
Every intel collector and analyst is trained from day one in the law, whether they be military or civilian. They can all quote the name and contents of the document that governs the ways the NSA and our government may designate intel targets both within and without our own borders. Anyone who collects on a target that has not been sanctioned from on-high, even if it is his or her own phone number, is on a fast track to prison.
The targets that are being monitored within our own borders are so because the trail from overseas led back here. Known terrorists, affiliates, fund raisers, materials providers, etc., made calls to people here in the USA, or people in the USA called them. The foreign phone would already be under surveillance, and of course the connection to the USA should raise questions for any sane law enforcement agency. The law provides for monitoring US citizens in this and other very narrowly-defined cases, though they must still be officially designated as targets, which is not a simple process. Even the warrantless taps only give a day or so of leeway, the government must prove in a hurry that they really need to be listening in or all data must be purged.
And perhaps the most important reason that you can go through your day without worrying if someone is listening in to you asking your Aunt Bea to bring her special blueberry pie to the family reunion is that analysts are Americans and have Aunt Bea's too, and they have the same expectation of privacy that you have. If they participate in a big-brother system that monitors our populace at a whim, then it's only a matter of time before that system grows and starts to eat its own.
The intel community is a very paranoid place - both about what others are doing, but incredibly more so about that activities of its own members.
... put their executives in jail. I wouldn't stand by and acquiesce to illegal activities, why should they be allowed to, irrespective of who asked?
Enough already with this "You so something bad for us and you're safe" bit.
Soap (check) -> Ballot (Check) -> Jury (Forbidden by Law) -> Ammo?
I'm not one to advocate for violence, but ya'know... when you have eliminated the impossible (or ineffective in this case) whatever remains...
this makes me mad
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
Despite your typos, I'd mod you up if I had the points. I didn't see them specifiy if it was wall clock hours or man hours. (I suppose you could further argue that they don't specify if any part of the man-hours are counted again for a different warrant, or if these were dedicated and discrete man hours to this. Much less how far down into the indirect support roles are included.)
So 200 hours could mean that someone entered something onto a screen in a computer system in five minutes and it was done. But they go back and count the time it takes to maintain the system, the techs to actually do the work, the approval process with multiple people, etc etc.
Or it could mean that from the time the process started, it takes 8 days for the wiretap to be in place.
Either way, I think this is a number used to create an impression rather than to convey any meaningful information.