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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.
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.
...thereby winning the war on drugs once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Of course they balked at being asked for access to the home records,
Criminal gangs, cartels and organisations are not individual customers and must have a business account with the phone company.
liqbase
Of course if this were a story about Government abuse of civil liberties in China, as applied to privacy, people would be decrying it as immaculate example of that failed, corruptible political system we call Communism. In America it just defers to "Well what have you got to hide, bad guy?"
Describing America in the context of Democracy becomes increasingly difficult.
So, my point: before posting a rant about the fascist big brother state that rules from beyond the centre of the Ultraworld, for heaven's sake take some actions to register your protest, and to work against it. This is the real freedom for which more abstract things like the right to not have your comms intercepted by the government. No-one's going to kick your door in at 5am and drag you off to Cuba for it, not yet anyway -(sadly I have to now include the disclaimer "unless you're very unlucky" :( ) There are 300,000-something EFF members and many more supporters, and we haven't ALL been arrested, not yet anyway ;)
Please, stick your hand in your pocket and send 'em $30 or whatever you can. Join, if you can afford it.
We now return you to the Soviet Russia jokes, tinfoil hat conspiracy theories and hair-splitting arguing the toss about the precise spec of the optical splitters being used in San Francisco.
Come on, now. The seriously bad dudes out there running major operations aren't (usually) dumb enough to pick up the phone and chat away about their to-do lists. I'd think the use of commodity encryption software and computers has probably replaced a lot of insecure communications channels for these people, leaving the feds to pick up the low-hanging fruit. Sure, you might nab man number 137 on the totem pole o' dealers through a wiretap, but you're not going to be troubling the guy at the top of the food chain.
I'd imagine this applies to all sorts of bad guys, whether they're slinging coke by the truckload or plotting terrorist acts. That begs the question: what's the real value of these surveillance programs?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
You're saying this "could very well have benefitted you"?!? Specify exactly how, please.
AFAICT, the only thing the war on drugs successfully accomplished in MY life was to increase the cost of drugs so much that the only way a lower-class American could pay for them was to commit property crimes. Thus I can personally thank the war on drugs for my car and mail getting stolen, and having to change my bank account. Hooray!
Without the war on drugs, someone in my neighborhood would have been using drugs while holding down a low-wage job. I'm certainly glad that nightmare scenario was avoided!
You know what I LOVE about this?
When "those evil communists" (and they WERE evil, no doubts about it) did the same damn thing in other countries, America's people wondered HOW IN BLAZES the Russians and the other Eastern Block people didn't revolt.
I mean, their rulers were reading their mail. Kidnapping those who spoke out against abuses, and torturing them... ahem *enhanced interrogating them*... Free speech zones were established, and those who dared speak elsewhere were arrested and sent to Gulags. People who failed to show up for vote or voted for the "upstart" candidate were harassed, and sometimes not heard from again if they dared speak out. Experiments were often run on citizens, and often on the military, without any information or informed consent given. Evidence was often planted of "seditious behavior" or "conspiracy to overthrow the People's Government", usually with some rusty gun being found in someone's haystack as "evidence". One of my uncles ran a small investigation unit when he was younger, and remarked to me as I was growing up, that it was amazing to him that the same gun was found in a dozen different individuals' homes. Those individuals, of course, were quickly apprehended for "intended terroristic activities" and were slam dunked in a typical "kangaroo court" (the name used was "special tribunals"). Nobody mentioned the serial number on the gun... those individuals were eventually executed.
How is it that those poor bastards living under communism didn't notice all this and put an end to it?! Well let me ask you this... how is it that the poor bastards living in the West don't also notice all this and raise hell? The pattern is the same, even the TERMS in use are the same. Strange that those digging in the future will ask the same questions of this civilization.
"How come they didn't see it or put an end to it? Were they really that stupid, gullible or blind? Did any of them at all actually walk away? Did any make it out?"
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
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.