Ex AT&T Tech Says NSA Monitors All Web Traffic

Sir Tandeth writes "A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom giant forwards virtually all of its internet traffic into a 'secret room' to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell's 1984. Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that all Internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office — to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access. 'Klein was on Capitol Hill Wednesday attempting to convince lawmakers not to give a blanket, retroactive immunity to telecom companies for their secret cooperation with the government. He said that as an AT&T technician overseeing Internet operations in San Francisco, he helped maintain optical splitters that diverted data en route to and from AT&T customers. '"

Comments

I've read about this before.

[morgan_greywolf]

You can read Klein's April 2006 statement in his own words here and there are pictures of the secret room at AT&T here.

Very scary stuff.

Re:I've read about this before.

[cavtroop]

and there are pictures of the secret room at AT&T here [wired.com] Hmm, interesting. Two pictures of random signs that could be anywhere, and two pictures of the front of the building. None of which show anything remotely interesting. Incriminating stuff, that :) Not that I don't think they do this, just that the pictures are....underwhelming...

Re:I've read about this before.

[PhreakinPenguin]

So if I post 4 images of the EXTERIOR of the main AT&T building, can I get modded informative too?

Re:I've read about this before.

[purpledinoz]

What's worse is that this will be justified under the guise of anti-terrorism. As bills get passed to erode the freedom of American's, I'm watching the US slowly descend into totalitarianism. Lets face it, Americans just don't care. And why should they? They live comfortable lives, entertained with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. If they follow the rules, they won't get hassled. Things will have to get pretty bad until people wake up and realize what has happened.

Re:I've read about this before.

[TheMeuge]

While I doubt that they "save" all the traffic, it is entirely possible, that transmitted data is scanned for certain key words and the flagged packets are then investigated further. I think it isn't unreasonable to suspect that the ENTIRE web traffic moving in and out of the computers of some AT&T clients is recorded.

Given this data, it is entirely clear that there is no reason to believe that any non-encrypted data is not going to be monitored, recorded, and traced.

While we must try to abort this particular endeavor through the civil process, it is rather clear to me that it's likely to be a futile effort. The way I see it, as the technological capability for total surveillance draws closer, the government and commercial entities will not be far behind.

Re:I've read about this before.

[Threni]

> What's worse is that this will be justified under the guise of anti-terrorism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_SHAMROCK

I'm not sure it's any worse than when it's justified by whatever the current bogeyman is. Could be terrorism, drugs, child porn, communism etc - it's always just a cover. Follow the money. Who gains from a powerful military, full prisons, terrible education and a fat, lazy corrupt police force?

Re:I've read about this before.

[Luke Dawson]

As bills get passed to erode the freedom of American's, I'm watching the US slowly descend into totalitarianism.

Actually, it's a really clever way of defeating terrorism, one that the terrorists will never catch on to! You see, since they hate us for our freedom, if we eliminate all of these pesky freedoms, the terrorists will have nothing to hate us for anymore! See, it makes perfect sense :)

Re:I've read about this before.

[darjen]

What's worse is that this will be justified under the guise of anti-terrorism. As bills get passed to erode the freedom of American's, I'm watching the US slowly descend into totalitarianism.

This is nothing new. It was all part of the neoconservative plan against communism before the Soviet Union fell. The new focus on terrorism is allowing them to continue their Big Government agenda. Lest you doubt what I'm saying, here it is straight from William F Buckley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F_Buckley#First_books

We have got to accept Big Government for the duration--for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. ... And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington...

Re:I've read about this before.

[vux984]

But alas, they don't hate us for our freedom and never have. So we're very busily and efficiently solving the wrong problem.

They hate us because we've been meddling in their governments, undermining their sovereignty, propping up dictators favorable to us, invading them when those propped up dictators fall out favor, all for our own national self interests.

I know your post was intended to be funny, and was, but the irony of situation is even worse.

Taking away our freedoms will never stop foreign terrorists from hating us for jerking their countries around. But it might well spawn an outbreak of domestic terrorism if they keep at it. The Unabomber was just a prelude, as the very type of stuff he lashed out about is coming to pass.

Re:I've read about this before.

[Duhavid]

"Next, I don't buy it because it's not feasible. How many NSA agents would it take to monitor ALL Internet traffic."

You assuming at least a couple things here
    A: That Agents are monitoring the traffic. Could be they are filtering for keywords. Storing for later review.
    B: That they are looking at all the traffic.

And on fighting terrorism, how about we stop sending them money that ends up making
them such a valuable part of the world? And I don't know what is wrong with leaving
them alone, really. There is some legitimacy to their grievances, you know.
What is now Israel was Palestine ( and before that had a variety of owners,
none of them Jewish until you get *really* far back ). Britain decides for
partition, and you have to give up your homeland, your business, your home
so that a bunch of people who have been practicing terrorism in your country
can have a home? If it were you, you would be pissed, and fighting back,
so would I. Why is that so hard to understand? Now, don't go getting on any
"you must hate Israelis" thing, furthest thing from the truth. I understand
( and support ) the idea of Israel having a homeland, but I also understand
that the Palestinians want the same, and have been moved to provide it for
the Israelis. Not to mention all the building that Israelis have done in
the contested areas to attempt to annex those areas.

And America has involved itself in this conflict, supplying arms and money
to support Israel.

I don't know what all the answers are, but starting the discussion with
ignoring where all the parties are "at" is not wise.

Re:I've read about this before.

[j_166]

Leprechauns?

Re:I've read about this before.

[cheezus_es_lard]

A couple of notes. AT&T is one carrier- it's likely the other US carriers, such as Qwest, Verizon, etc. are all doing the same thing. CALEA has done a lot for voice in the auto-intercept arena, and they're all compliant with it- hence the presence of automatically-receptive departments at the telcos who _already deal with these people_. Installing splitters and a 'secret room' isn't that far fetched, considering that most CO facilities already use 10% splitters on their fiber backbones for testing purposes, installing another set to route to the NSA doesn't seem that hard. In the dark room, have yourself a bunch of fiber gear designed to recreate the incoming signal and coupled with packet re-assemblers which reconstitute the data streams and mine those that are tagged interesting, and route them directly over DS-3, OC-3 or better (who knows how much dark fiber NSA's got in use?? 49 billion buys a lot...) into the NSA's intercept facility. All of a sudden diverse paths, multihoming, even Tor seem less capable of obfuscating your data's origins- your different paths are all re-constituted at NSA, and then mined for intel. Combine this with a broader-scale mining of data focused on terrorism, drugs, any topic of interest, and you have a massively broad filter capable of doing heuristics on national trends on any different topic, as well as a tool for law enforcement to gather intel for both domestic (warrantless wiretaps, anyone) and foreign surveillance- large portions of Internet transit the USA.

People used to talk about the acres of computing facilities at the NSA. They're on the bleeding edge in all their tech- and you think they can't reconstitute some diversely-pathed packet data? Encryption? Please. If it's electronic, it's insecure. Get it through your heads.

love and peace.
-cheez

Re:I've read about this before.

[QuickFox]

How does monitoring bits over a wire limit your freedom If a CIA officer followed you everywhere, always two steps behind you, registering and reporting every opinion you utter and every person you contact, would you feel that your freedom and your democratic rights were being respected?

Is monitoring on a wire better just because it happens far away where you can't see it?

I suppose you feel that it's tolerable as long as government and law enforcement remain reasonably democratic and every officer of the law remains reasonably uncorrupted. But how long will they remain this way, and not succumb to the temptations inherent in these arrangements? Temptation has a very strong corrupting effect.

or prevent you from voting? Democracy isn't just voting. Lots of countries have voting without being democratic.

Re:I've read about this before.

[QuickFox]

Some people also don't believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact. Far, far more people die from traffic accidents than from terrorism. It would make far, far more sense to sacrifice freedom and democracy for the sake of saving traffic lives. The same goes for tobacco, alcohol, and many other causes of death. Terrorism is really tiny. Sacrificing democracy for such a tiny cause makes no sense.

Re:I've read about this before.

[Martin Blank]

Could be ... communism

With a few exceptions, the kinds of curtailment that are happening or being attempted now were not tried on a large scale when communism was the major scare. Instead, the fact that such measures weren't in place was held up as the difference between us and the communists.

Re:I've read about this before.

[Duhavid]

"Well, the post says ALL TRAFFIC. (it does go on to say all of AT&T's traffic, however). Even so, it's not feasible"
"We learn in The Internet for Dummies that any two packet do not have to, and probably will not take the same route to get from A to B."

Quibbling. Are they copying data, and should they? That they are possibly not copying *all* has little relevance to the right/wrongness of this.

"First, it was the UN that partitioned that area, not Britain."

OK. It still was not an invitation by the Palestinians to come live with them.
It was an external decision imposed on the people living there.

"The Palestinians have a homeland."

And do they have control that that? I recall news articles from
after Hamas won the election about Israel cutting off tax revenue
to them. Doesnt sound like any kind of real homeland to me.
Would you consider it sufficient?

"The UN resolution did not give the land that Palestinians claim was Palestine and give it to the Israelis. They took a piece of land that was British"

A British colony, imposed by force by British arms.
The Palestinians were the ones living there.

"and gave half to Israel and half to the Palestinians."

If you have something, someone claims control of that
something, and gives half to you, half to someone else,
will you be satisfied?

"When Israel was attacked for being there (notice that British were not) by every neighboring Arab nation, they said, "Screw you people, we're taking it all!""

A: Every Arab nation is not Palestine.
B: I understand that part of the history. Yes.
And I understand that the Arabs were being very
hostile to Israel, and I understand how Israel
is not really liking that. They have legitimate
security concerns. I get it.

Believe it or not, I am not saying that the Palestinians are 100% right and
the Israeli's 100% wrong in this issue.

"Since then, they have given it back."

Have they?

"Still not good enough evidently. The Palestinians want to claim that all of the land that was once British was really Palestine and they want it all back."

It was Ottoman Empire, then a British colony after the war.
Again, it was still Palestinians living there. Africa, India,
Pakistan, America, Canada, etc, etc were all once British colonies.
What legitimacy do colonial holdings from centuries past have to
do with government today, especially with all that has been said
about self determination?

In other words, I don't think the Palestinians bought into the
"it's British" idea, it was still "theirs". The Western world
may have recognized it as British, but they likely didn't.

And once again, if you owned something, someone else claimed it,
and divided it and told you you could have half simply because
of the force of arms, would you walk away happy?
I don't know where you are politically or economically, but if
you have ever argued that taxes are stealing, or that they are
a government monopoly, unfair and imposed, this is the same
thing.

"That was 50+ years ago. At what point to give up? Would you support Native Americans lobbing mortars into New York from Jersey? Would you support them launching missiles into Detroit from a reservation in Michigan? What's the difference (other than this had always been Indian land)?"

Not much difference. There is also the Irish problem as an excellent
example. I don't know when to give up.

Also, an important distinction. I am *NOT* saying I *support* any of
the above using terrorism. I am saying I *understand* where they are
coming from, how they feel they don't have many other choices on the
matter. Also, recall that in negotiations, you don't get much from a
position of weakness. Reagan and Thatcher both argued that ( correctl

Re:I've read about this before.

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet they don't bomb Mexico, Canada, Africa, Japan, Russia, etc even though they're all different cultures. You're fooling yourself if you think that our political actions don't put us towards the top of their shitlist.

Indeed some muslims want to kill us all. Does that warrant spending over http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN24507537200710242 TRILLION dollars mostly borrowed from the Chinese to kill them? Our president spends money like a teenager with a credit card, without care for who's going to have to pay it back or the price of interest. That kind of short-sightedness is going to screw us over in the next 30 years.

Re:I've read about this before.

[poot_rootbeer]

Some people also don't believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact.

I would rather die than allow the protections guaranteed to us by the Constitution to be stolen from us.

Anybody who would not is a wretched coward.

Re:I've read about this before.

[porkchop_d_clown]

Oh yeah? Go take pictures of important buildings in the middle of the day across town and see if you don't get questioned by the police after a few hours? If it takes you a couple of hours to take pictures of the outside of the building, I would expect the police to pick you up. And give you a breathalizer, a drug test and to check if you were an escapee from the Home For The Easily Bewildered.

Re:I've read about this before.

[Das Modell]

And yet they don't bomb Mexico, Canada, Africa, Japan, Russia, etc even though they're all different cultures. You're fooling yourself if you think that our political actions don't put us towards the top of their shitlist.

America's position does put it at the top of the shitlist, but that doesn't mean that it's only targeted because of its foreign policies.

Islamic fundamentalism is alive and well in Africa, and there's also fundamentalist and terrorist activity in Canada. Islamic fundamentalism is also a problem in Britain, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Italy and Australia.

New meaning to the phrase...

[NotQuiteReal]

Come take a drink from the firehose!

Encrypt

[Monstard]

The future of internet is encrypted internet.

Re:Encrypt

[marcop]

No. Why should I? The constitution is clear on this issue. The true answer is impeach those responsible and prosecute At&T. criminally.

Re:Encrypt

[644bd346996]

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. Clear enough? No warrant, no searches or seizures of my stuff. They are particularly prohibited from searching through all of my correspondence without a warrant.

Re:Encrypt

[Shimmer]

The insufficiency of analogy to more traditional means of communication (postal service in sealed envelopes, telegraph, town crier, word of mouth, whatever) is sufficient demonstration that the constitution is unclear on these matters.

Fine. Have you by any chance ever read the 10th Amendment?

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In other words, if the Constitution is unclear and there is no relevant law then the Federal Govt. has no power whatsoever to intercept our Internet traffic.

Whoa

[yamamushi]

Thats a LOT of porn!

Re:"All" internet traffic?

[Frosty Piss]

I am somehow not convinced... how many TB of data would a major provider like that move in a day? Those would have to be some moby servers...

That it is all forwarded through that secret room doesn't mean that they look at it all. Perhaps they have some algorithm, some system or filter, for determining what they want to look at closer...

Anything about this in AT&T Privacy Statement?

[StefanJ]

You know, those little pamphlets full of fine print that get shoved in your bill and promptly thrown away because they're purposely made to be obscure and hard to read?

If there's no "we allow an obscure government agency look at everything you read, write, say and listen to without court order or accountability" clause, can we sue the fuckers?

Re:Doubtful

[Divide By Zero]

The fact that a thing cannot be done well in a reasonable amount of time within a predetermined budget has never gotten in the way of our government trying to do it anyway.

It's like some bad Soviet Russia joke...

[Overzeetop]

..but with extra "bad" and no "joke".

Re:"All" internet traffic?

[truthsearch]

If only there were some device which could look at each packet that's passed through it and determine where to send it... To route the packets, if you will...

ALL Internet

[mi]

forwards virtually all of its internet traffic

This reminds me of that anecdote from years back about a question asked by a clueless user on how he can "download all of the Internet" at once and take it with him...

Seriously, are we supposed to believe, that "virtually all" of AT&T Internet traffic passes through one facility in San Francisco? It is likely, they have the same rooms in all major nodes, though...

Which brings us back to those earlier laws obliging phone companies to maintain equipment in all central offices, which would allow the government to eavesdrop on anybody's phone calls. Sure, the police needed a warrant to actually perform the eavesdropping. But the equipment and the facilities ("secret rooms") are always there.

What they most likely don't need a warrant for is the statistics — did the number of calls to so-and-so suddenly increase? Did he call such-and-such after this-and-this called him?..

Most likely, NSA is looking for similar things on the Internet — there is a lot of insight to be gained from simply knowing, which sites get more traffic in (possible) correllation with certain events... And then, again, there is a need for the equipment to always be there, so that warranted intercepts of the datastreams can be performed too.

Yes, this is prone to abuse. No, it can not be effectively audited by the public without "compromising" (or even "jeopardizing") "the mission". The only relief comes from the knowledge, that any evidence illegally collected still can not be used against anyone in the court of law...

Re:Olbermann?

[QCompson]

Come on, that Countdown program is just about as biased left as you can get. I guess bias for the liberal side is called news, and bias for conservatives is an outrage, requiring an attack dog like Media Matters. It's a good thing that Fox News exists, or there would be no conservative voices in the media at all.

No kidding. Remember in the run-up to the Iraq war when the Bush administration couldn't get their agenda across to the american people because all the lefty news outlets refused to parrot their claims? Oh wait, that's right. Pretty much 99% of the American media (including the highly "liberal" New York Times) spent the years 2002-2004 mindlessly repeating the administration's talking points without doing any independent reporting.

But still, it's a good thing we have Fox News. Otherwise where would I get all the newest info on my favorite celebrities (what's that silly Paris up to today)? Or how I would know which ethnic/religious/political group to direct my hatred towards?

Credentials?!

[yhetti]

I'm not going to claim it's not happening, but this is not the guy to listen to. I don't want to be a dick about this, but he's not a network engineer, he's not a network admin, he's not a data specialist...he's a cable splicer. He does VDV work for AT&T. Is it possible, if not likely, that he maybe doesn't have a complete understanding of how all the tubes work past Layer 1? (And just to really be a dick about it, every VDV person I've met claims to be a data network expert because they lay the wires. Ask one why Ethernet is limited to 100M by spec and watch the fun.)

With only 20 of those facilities, and just in AT&T locations, the fibertaps wouldn't even have a significant percentage of traffic going through them. Do some traceroutes; do some ping tests; Try it from different providers. They would have to be routing all traffic through those points. Your ping times would know, and the global BGP tables would know.

I have a comfortable tinfoil hat. What I *could* be easily convinced of is that the NSA has taps on all oceanic fiber. That's much easier to do, since there's not all that many. And...frankly, they should be. We pay them a lot of money to keep us safe. A *lot* of money. But I don't think this is the guy to listen to regarding something this big and damning.

Re:Credentials?!

[nehumanuscrede]

Considering I WORK for AT&T, I would give him far more credit than any engineer
or planner this company employs. They are engineers in title only. If you want
to know how things work within a Central Office, go ask the folks who work in it.
They have far better insight than the planners do.

The ONLY other possible explanation for having a room full of equipment locked up
would be a co-located company. It's not uncommon for other carriers to have
equipment in the office that's unaccessible to AT&T and vice versa.

However, none of them require a government clearance to gain entry. Just a
simple key. Nor are they usually hidden from view. They simply put up wire cages
to restrict access to the rooms in question.

All it will take is an audit of the fibers in question and the splitters. If the
splitters actually exist on the backbone fibers and they route into that room, then
AT&T will have some explaining to do. Simple as that.

The theory I've kicked around is this type of equipment will have a specific eqpt
code in the databases AT&T uses. ( Assuming it's inventoried at all. Though the
word document produced indicates that it might be ) Shouldn't be all that tough to run
an eqpt scan against a Central Office CLLI code to see if it shows up in the
inventory. . . .

Just a theory mind you ;)

Now as to the percentage of the internet comment I saw earlier.

Do you actually believe this is the ONLY office this type of setup is installed in ?
Please. If this gear is what we all think it is, then the major Toll buildings
( read that the major hubs ) will likely ALL have this gear installed in it. It's
just a matter of figuring out which offices have been compromised. Probably easy to
spot. Find the biggest serving office in any given city and start your search there.

It's also doubtful they are saving the Internet in real time. It's more than likely
a scan and flag type setup. It's likely not even done on site. It's far more probable
that the redirected traffic is shipped out another fiber that is directly connected to
an NSA office in the region.

For the encryption comment:

The day we start encrypting everything on the net will be the day you see the bills
popping back up to keep those ' terrorist tools ' out of the hands of the average
citizen.

Are you saying Bush faked his Guard documents?

[nunyadambinness]

"The Bush camp has done this kind of thing before"

It seems upon first reading that you're claiming the Bush camp faked the documents that Rather lost his career over.

Did I misread you?

And if not,could you please source that? Your link doesn't address it at all. I haven't heard that accusation before, and would like to see something to support it.

Culture warior...

[WallaceAndGromit]

There are religious maniacs out there that hate our culture...

What, like this one?

Re:Culture warior...

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Yes, O'Reilly is clearly far more dangerous than the global Jihad.

Well, actually, yes.

You see, all of the jihad is based on demagougery exploiting various, mostly unrelated, real or imagined grievances in the Arab world, and aims at creation of violence and warfare towards all and any comers who are unlike the target audience via indoctrination, lies, manipulation of facts etc and so on. At the forefront of the movement are loudmouth morons who spew constant stream of anti-everything-non-fundamentalist-Islam invective and rouse various sociopaths to action, mostly via small arms warfare combined with improvised explosives, punctuated by suicidal bomb attacks and a very rare spectacular terrorist assault on foreign soil, which results in few thousand casualties per year on average.

On the other hand we have demagougery exploiting various, mostly unrelated, real or imagined grievances in of the xenophobic, supremacist white subsectuion of American society, which aims at creation of violence and warfare towards all and any comers who are unlike the target audience via indoctrination, lies, manipulation of facts etc and so on. At the forefront of the movement are loudmouth morons who spew constant stream of anti-everything-non-white-upper-class-Christainst invective and rouse various sociopaths to action, mostly via large scale warfare, aerial bombardment and wholesale occupation of foreign nations, exctrajudicial imprisonment in Gulags, torture etc, with hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq alone in a period of 4 years.

In other words, O'Reilly, Coulter, Malkin etc are the ideological equivalents of Osama and various pontificating radical Imams in their various Madrassas. The difference is that their spew is empirically proven to be capable of causing vastly more damage and casualties than that of all the modern jihadis combined so far.

Perheaps that will change when the Pakistani nukes change hands to Taliban or Al-Queda and O'Reilly and Osama will start competing on more even terms.

None of which of course helps the more sane part of the humanity which is likely to caught in the crossfire caused by the blowhard morons of the world.

My dream is that one day all of the most insane of the violence promoting demagouges like O'Reilley, Coulter and Osama are all caught, given flamethrowers or some such and sent to an uninhabited island to practice what they preach on each other, while the rest of the world goes on about making our lives better. The last one standing gets to own the island where his followers are all sent as a punishment to listen to his or her whining 24/7 for the rest of their short lives.

Re:Shameful

[soren100]

It is already a totalitarianism state, you don't have to wait for it.

Your words are, frankly, insulting to the millions of individuals who lost their liberty, lives, property, and loved ones in REAL totalitarian states. Read the Gulag Archipelago sometime and get informed. The problem is, that the REAL totalitarian states never just appear fully formed. They go through stages. Germany before WWI had a constitution and elected its leaders in a democratic (or at least Republican, to be more correct) fashion. There were no gas chambers then.

Another example is that the Jews were forced to wear the yellow "star of david" on their clothes in 1938. If they were to complain about the regulations and say that they were living in a "police state", then by your logic they could easily be ridiculed because the concentration camps such as Auschwitz had not been built yet -- construction on those started in 1940. By your logic the star of david is just a patch on a coat, nothing to be worried about, right? So by your words and logic they would be "frankly, insulting" their future selves who would be dying in the gas chambers two years later.

The problem with your logic is that you are saying that a person cannot complain about the totalitarian nature of his country until he can be killed for just complaining about the totalitarian nature of his country -- a "catch 22".

America is definitely becoming less and less free every day and more authoritarian -- that is very easy to see. The right of privacy is guaranteed by our constitution, and when it is public knowledge that our government is publicly ignoring that constitution that is definitely the time to complain. Our constitution was created to protect us from our government and when our government starts treating it like toilet paper it is time definitely time to do something.

I honestly think you feel good about yourself through pretending you live in a totalitarian state for the same reason that Christians enjoy hearing stories about "persecuted Christians" in third-world hell holes. It is illegal for the government to do domestic warrantless wiretapping, yet they admit that they are doing it. It is illegal for the government to torture people, yet they admit they are doing it. It is illegal for the government to deny people their judicial due process by taking people to secret prisons in foreign countries, but they admit they are doing it. Anyone who does not understand that American rights and freedoms, like the right to privacy and t are disappearing has their head in the sand.

America is no longer the "land of the free and home of the brave" and it is very much high time for everyone to start recognizing that fact and start speaking up. Trying to say that our government is not repressive enough or authoritarian enough to speak up about it is ridiculous. The people who were tortured and killed at Abu Ghraib and other places at the hands of our government would not find those words "frankly, insulting". They would say that those words are an understatement.

When people in America joke on a regular basis that if you say anything against the government that you might be sent to Guantanamo, and when our elected officials argue about whether or not repeatedly drowning someone and reviving them is torture, you can be pretty sure that we have crossed the line that divides a free state and an authoritarian state.