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More Details Emerge On Domestic Spying Programs
The feed brings us this NYTimes story giving new details on the telecom carriers' cooperation with secret NSA (and other) domestic spying programs. One revelation is that the Drug Enforcement Agency has been running a program since the 1990s to collect the phone records of calls from US citizens to Latin America in order to catch narcotics traffickers. Another revelation is what exactly the NSA asked for in 2001 that Qwest balked at supplying. According to the article, it was access to the company's most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls.
And he's not just wanted by any government. He's wanted by the so called "most powerful country on earth."
FTFA:
Not without a wiretap warrent, I hope. It's amazing what kind of cooperation a warrent will still get. So, this is a nice excuse if you don't think about it very long.
Secure communications are not just a Constitutionally protected right, they are a prerequisite for business.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Public snafu's aside, the point being, since either Bush Sr. approved the DEA program and Clinton allowed it to continue or Clinton approved it, that our previous administration had some secretive, shadowy, unaccountable programs that bare a striking resemblance to the secretive, shadowy, unaccountable programs of the current administration. So while preemptively Old News-ing any Bush apologists it also seems that there might be some Democrat apologists that need to reevaluate the overall current state of our politics and politicians as well. This seems to me to be a much better course of action than our current system of voting for the lesser of two evils because the 3rd parties are viable and if you waster your vote on some green, the guy you really don't want to gain office might do just that.
That's because the DEA doesn't really care about stopping drugs. They care about getting some guy, even if the is #137 on the totem pole, to justify their extravagant funding (any amount over $0 is extravagant).
The DEA is a government jobs program.
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
As long as 41 Republicans remain in mindless lock-step with Dear Leader, anything and everything will be filibustered.
Sure. But make them haul out the cots and phone books and start reading aloud on national TV, let's have a proper filibuster. Make them look like the obstructionist fools they are.
As long as 34 Republicans remain in lock-step with Dear Leader, anything and everything that isn't exactly what Dear Leader wants will be vetoed.
True. But there's nothing (except lack of spine) to prevent Congress from passing the same bill again and sending it back. Again and again, if necessary. If Leader obstructs the bills from becoming law, whose fault is that?
I second that. I've been in this country for two weeks and it seems that the homegrown lunatics outnumber the foreign lunatics by a factor of approximately infinity. The mall in Omaha, both churches in Denver, that teenager in Las Vegas... My sample size is growing disturbingly fast. Sure, they haven't hijacked any planes, but if the goal is terror, then all it takes is one of the above crazies opening up in a mall/church/bus stop.
sustainable living
Well, there needs to be a little red verses blue. When news of this first happened Bush claimed there was nothing wrong with it and that the previous administration had done the same. Of course that was adamantly denied while at the same time that same administration or elements of the former Clinton administration fueled the outrage over the programs.
A good majority of why America is pissed about this is because the people who denied doing it. It is only fair that the american public knows that portions of their outrage was a direct manipulation by people just as guilty if not more so. There actually is something to be said about a something that has been done before and not declared illegal. It directly gives other people who know about it the impression that it is legal. But that isn't the point.
The point is that a good majority of people were nothing but tools for certain people to gain some political advantage. Not only were they manipulative, but they lied in th process of doing the same. How can you trust the rest of the stuff they are claiming you should be outraged over? And I think the biggest shame of it all is the fact that people aren't legitimately outraged by these things on their own without lies and manipulations from one side attempting to gain a political advantage. Who in the two party system is actually the lessor of two evils?
Would you rather your rights to privacy and liberty mostly-disappear the moment anyone suspects drugs might be involved, as they do presently? My proposal might not be optimal, but it's one hell of a lot better than what we're trying to do now.
On the other hand, this whole thing is arguably null: Psuedoephedrine's optical isomer is just as effective at relieving congestion, can't be turned into meth, and has fewer side-effects to boot. You have three guesses which bunch of dickbags are sitting on the patent.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m39190&hd=&size=1&l=e
wake up, 'merkins.
If it weren't for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no songs.
It is ridiculous to think that lying about having an affair is an impeachable offense but lying about a foreign country's intent and capabilities in order to bring the country into a war which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars is not.
The simple fact of the matter is that the official word on what is an impeachable offense is quite vague, and basically comes down to anything which a majority of the House of Representatives can agree on. There does not need to be an actual specific law broken in order for any of this to happen. The Constitution simply states "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors", and it's hard to argue that lying the country into a worthless war is not a high crime or misdemeanor.
umm... a constitutional republic is a form of democracy.
and you're incorrect in that the post you reply to (kryten_nl) is certainly not referring to a constitutional republic, but pure representative democracy. A constitutional republic would be more inclined to protect the interests of minorities from "mobocracy," unlike, as is described, the ideal of pure representative democracy. Maybe you yourself don't know the difference?
I'm just confused why your post is modded so high when it seems irrelevant.
Or, who are you replying to? did you mean to reply to delire's post and hit the wrong button? but.. I'm not so sure "Describing America in the context of a 'constitutional republic' becomes increasingly difficult" would have been a sensible/understandable statement, especially since no one generally would have described America "in the context of a constitutional republic." Sure maybe that's because most people don't know what it is, nor the advantages it *should* provide since the US supposedly is one... but who cares? Delire gets his/her point across just fine, and kryten_nl certainly ads to that point.
Really though it's not a question of political systems, it's a question of value systems. Those of us in America, grew up being taught to think of individual rights as being the superior good. Those who grew up in China, grew up being taught that the advancement of a society as a whole is the superior good. When those two values come into conflict, Chinese people, (if given the chance), would probably have voted based on the later value system, whereas Americans would have voted based on the individuality based value system.
For example, if the Chinese government could afford socialized public healthcare, they would have it. They plan to have it by 2020, when they probably will be able to afford it given their rapid economic development. In America, we could have afforded it (not so sure now with war debts), yet we whole-heartedly reject anything that infringes upon our ability to independently choose what portion of our finances go into our personal health care. Unfortunately as well, Americans fail to see that an insurance company is not much different from a governing agency: that in buying into health insurance you've essentially bought into a citizenry in a private governing agency that takes away all of your individual health care choice rights anyways, but with less concern for your well being than a government health care program would have.
More recently as far as I can tell, Chinese are gaining in individual freedoms, whereas Americans as a whole, partly just due to fear, are letting go of their hold on such individual rights. Though they may have a lot of internet censorship in China that we would consider ridiculous (in that they'll censor porn and anti-government posts, all the while telling you that they are doing it, while we'll censor 75 year old "copyrighted" material from being circulated, and quietly tap into your communications), regardless, the internet has recently opened them up to a wealth of information access. I think they're also seeing the society-wide advantages that often are the result of "special economic zones" and free trade. The Chinese seem to be dealing with two (occasionally conflicting) value systems, both of which they derive benefits from.
The Americans in contrast, losing their value of individual freedoms, turn to what? Value of safety? A fall of Americans from valuing strong defense of individual rights, to the current greatest concern of protection of basic physical safety, can only be seen as a sharp decline in moral and living standards.
It's kind of like a maslov's hierarchy of needs thing though too. American's are so fearing of basic safety (irrationally would be the opinion of most of us on slashdot) that they can't be bothered to think about any kind of freedom or real values anymore. What it says to me is "don't go home." (I'm in China now).
Why bother tapping Americans' phones to search for narcotraffickers when they could just bust the CIA, which alternates torture flights with cocaine flights? Iran/Contra forever!
Or maybe they need to tap phonecalls from Cheney to his Saud buddies. Iran/Contra forever!
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make install -not war
Risky, with plenty of opportunities for failure, but then so are undercover infiltration exercises, and they still happen from time to time.
Oh, and I'm nit-picking, but it doesn't beg the question, it raises it. Begging the question is something else entirely, but most people make that mistake (so the meaning of the phrase will probably be changing soon anyway)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The problem is that this article is just ASSUMING that domestic spying occurs... without any justification except a few court cases with unknown details. My question is how do we know DOMESTIC spying is happening? Monitoring primarily local lines does not mean all the lines are monitored. The only lines that would be monitored are those of NON-US PERSONS (though it may be in the United States. It just seemed to me that the NY Times was simply trying to make a big deal out of something that they didn't know all of the facts about. I don't know all of the facts, but I know more than most people, and the NY Times article was poorly researched and showed that they clearly did not understand how the US intelligence service worked.
And also, "Congressional sources familiar with limited aspects of the program would not discuss any classified details but made it clear there were serious questions about the legality of the NSA actions. The sources, who demanded anonymity, said there were conditions under which it would be possible to gather and retain information on Americans if the surveillance were part of an investigation into foreign intelligence.
Note that potential gets you on the list: "The effort, which began within days after the attacks, has consisted partly of monitoring domestic telephone conversations, e-mail and even fax communications of individuals identified by the NSA as having some connection to al Qaeda events or figures, or to potential terrorism-related activities in the United States, the official said."
Here is the clincher, though: