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More Details Emerge On Domestic Spying Programs

Posted by kdawson on from the government-and-business-a-sittin'-in-a-tree dept.

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.

4 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Criminals aren't concerned by The+Master+Control+P · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. CIA Torture Jet wrecks with 4 Tons of COCAINE by PurPaBOO · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. CIA Torture/Cocaine Plane Crashes in Yucatan by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  4. Re:begging the question by dingDaShan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.