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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."
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.
Of course there is a lot of truth in this... France did have a lot of presence in Iraq and made a bundle, but the *people* are pissed about something else. Saying that the world is pissed out of envy and money is just pure bs. There is the whole spectrum your carelessly choose to ignore. How about invading a sovereign country, killing thousands of civilians and generally destabilizing the middle east even more while doing some cowboy shit about terrorists are behind every stone and thus any measure is ok. Generally you have polarized the world as well, either your with us or your against us. Saddam was a dictator and we can't have that... All while supporting other countries who are run by dictatorship. Of the top of my head: Using capital punishment on your own citizens is a biggie. Degrading taliban and terrorists to Enemy combatant and thus denying them the rights of the Geneva Convention. No trials either. By doing this, imo you have let the terrorists destroy what you are trying to defend - freedom. And at the same time those who are whistleblowers get the sharp end of the stick for doing just that, ensuring that illegal stuff doesn't pass. I'm from Sweden and there is a general resentment that just wasn't there during the Clinton era.
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.
No you didn't. To begin with I do not think you (singular) served in both WWI and WWII, so stop bragging about "We".
In WWI the US had hardly a modern army to speak of. The US entered the war late and did little. It may be debated whether they tipped the balance, but it is a fact that Germany and Austria-Hungary were already at the brink of collapse in 1917. And anyway, Germany in WWI was just any nation at war, no better or worse than the other ones. They had not even started the war (Austria-Hungary did), so what's the point in talking of "liberation"? From what? In any case, the US sacrificed very little compared to the British, yet I don't hear the British whine so much about the French being ungrateful.
In WWII, most of the work to win the war was done by the Soviets. On any reasonable scale (soldiers dead, enemy soldiers killed, land lost, land gained, overall number of dead, ...), the Soviet Union sacrificed much more than the US, even counting in the Pacific theatre where only the US were active. The eastern front saw the two most bloody battles in human history at the same time (Leningrad and Stalingrad), each three times larger than the one in third place (battle of Wuhan). Had the US stayed out, France would have been liberated by the USSR instead of the USA, or it would simply have risen up and taken back sovereignty when Berlin would eventually have fallen to the Red Army.
So cut the "we saved the world"-crap. The reason the US emerged as a superpower after WWII was that they had gone through two world wars without a single enemy soldier on their terrain, and had entered only when the outcome was almost guaranteed. Just like Switzerland, the US found out that not having armies marching through your country is beneficial to the economy.
According to Transparency International, the most corrupt politician ever was Suharto, dictator of Indonesia. Do I have to tell you who installed the guy, let him carry genocidal policies including but not limited to the invasion of East Timor?
I don't "hate America", I think people (Americans, French, Congolese, Tikopians) who refuse to hear criticism of their own country, stick by the motto "good or bad it's my country", or trust the government (any government) are stupid and a threat to democracy.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Here's the thing, there's probably not much that you need to personally apologize for (I'm guessing here.. I don't know you, who knows). What's missing is a national, formal acceptance of fault. Many in your country need to let go of the idea that accepting a mistake on the part of their country is tantamount to pissing on their graves of their ancestors.
Without an explicit acceptance of what your country ended up doing wrong, there is little hope of avoiding a repeat of the exact same thing in some other context. How are you, as a nation, going to educate your children so that they don't fall for the exact same trap when some tragedy strikes their country when THEY are the electorate? How is it possible to do this when every single time someone brings up a criticism, some weasel pops out of the waxwork to distract attention towards irrelevant actions by others? How is your personal apology going to combat that?
Your attitude seems to be one of putting things behind you and moving on.. which is understandable considering the embarassing trauma I'm sure you are suffering from.. but this is the wrong reaction to have. At the very least, your country owes it to the millions of people whose lives were ruined in part because of its actions, to examine what went wrong, reconcile with it, and put in place measures to avoid it. And don't for a second let yourself think that this expectation is somehow limited to just America. Every country has that obligation. Some may live up to that obligation, and others may not, but whether or not some other country holds itself up to a high standard shouldn't be a basis for excusing your own. It may seem to many that America receives an unfair amount of attention on this front.. but for christ's sake.. you're the most powerful nation in the world. Your influence affects EVERYBODY.. so OF COURSE people are going to scrutinize your actions more than the actions of others. You should welcome that, and rise to the challenge, and not run up a tree like a flayed cat.
Also, don't take this as me personally addressing you. I am speaking towards general tendencies I identify in your country's population, in your media, in your national social identity.
Now, I'm not sure abut your claim about America being the world's "greatest country", but I'd agree that your country has a many qualities that others could learn from, and that you have great potential.. for both good and bad. Your history is full of examples of both, and pointing out the bad does not detract from the good. Likewise, pointing out the good does not excuse the bad (and neither does pointing out the bad in others), and does not excuse the need for an honest self-appraisal amongst your citizens on the role their country plays in the world. This is one area where your people have been far too lax.
"I'm not a history buff....I was going to ask why there was all this interest overthere way back when in the 30's-50's as another poster mentioned. I mean, oil from over there wasn't as big a concern back then was it?"
e lations#The_1950s_and_the_politics_of_oil.2C_a_tur ning_point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States-Iran_r
Yes. that's why we helped the Brits depose the democracy in Iran and set up the shah. The whole rationale was that the democratic government there wanted to boot out the British oil companies and run their natural resource exploitation locally on better terms for the locals. You know, a free market, not a demand-side imperial market. Small wonder that bit of hypocrisy (we claim to love democracy and to want to spread it, but topple it when the locals elect leaders that do stuff we don't like) earned us a dark place in the hearts of Iranians.
We've also done it in Latin America.
I love hearing interventionist conservatives claim we're spreading democracy and how that's such a good thing when our history is full of American interventionists toppling democracies. It's the elephant in the room that isn't spoken of: they'll blab platitudes about our noble objectives until those we're "helping" decide to do something we don't like. Then we find it more advantageous to throw them back into the tender mercies of despotism.
And for the record, I'm not a "lib" or "commie" or whatever loaded word you care to use because you disagree with me: I'm an independent with fiscally-conservative, anti-authoritarian, anti-interventionist, libertarian, and constitutionalist leanings.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay