Slashdot Mirror
FBI Wiretaps Canceled for Non-Payment
grassy_knoll writes "Apparently, the FBI hasn't been paying the telcos for the wiretaps they've initiated, so the telcos have canceled the wiretaps. From the AP article linked: 'Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.
A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.
In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation "was halted due to untimely payment," the audit found.'"
I can see it now, bunch of old crusty white dudes sitting around a boardroom "Well, if Congress won't get off their asses and grant us amnesty for warrant-less wiretapping we'll just have to get their attention now won't we"
My Sig Sucks
When I hear wiretap and FBI in the same phrase, my knee jerk reaction is, especially recently, to attack the FBI. But this is awful. The US does occasionally use wiretaps for their intended purpose and, when they do, it's damned important that they be in-place and reliable. The telecoms are certainly within their rights to refuse service for non-payment, but what kind of a dysfunctional organization can't even pay their phone-bill on time? If my company's phone service was terminated, heads would roll.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
The love of money. Source of all things evil throughout the world (that's in the Bible somewhere). And if you're in corporate America, it's also the source of all motivation.
How much is your own privacy worth to you? Can't put a price on it, can you? But it's amazing how fast some people can come up with a dollar amount when it's someone else's privacy. I guess the same can be said about a human life--unfortunately.
Here's something (that is hopefully) a bit enraging to think about. You may be paying taxes to your government that fund an agency to spy on you. Hell, with the NSA wiretapping, the odds are high. How do you like that business model? You're paying for someone to watch you and press charges against you if you do something wrong. What an investment!
And this is all very patriotic of the Telcos, serving their government up until they are past due on payments. All in the name of justice and freedom, indeed! This is genuinely amazing, you just can't even make this stuff up, people.
My work here is dung.
1. make sure to confuse the need to condemn bad and corrupt law enforcement with the need to condemn all law enforcement, good and bad
2. make sure to confuse the need to question improperly obtained wiretap warrants with the need to question all wiretaps warrants, proper and improper
there, now you are ready to flame on in misunderstanding and miscommunication on the subject of wiretapping. enjoy!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Another puissant argument against "warrantless wiretapping." If these investigations and programs (and agents) are so poorly supervised by the FBI, it's ludicrous to insinuate that the people ought to trust them to do the Right Thing.
If it really was patriotism that motivated they would let billing issues slide. So I guess this proves we should not give them a pass on the illegal ones since they will stop tapping for money, but not for laws which is the ultimate in contempt for law.
As a secular progressive, I'm curious, what is the conservative Republican line on this one?
- Are the phone companies bad for shutting off the FBI and thereby "aidin' terrirsts"?
OR
- Are the phone companies fully justified by free market economics in shutting off a deadbeat government agency that wouldn't even have a budget but stealing it in the form of taxes from hard working Americans?
...this sort of news is what as known as "disinformation".
So it's OK to let your guard down now because those screwups at the FBI can't manage to pay their bills on time. Sorry, but I call bullshit on that one.
If somebody with clout thinks you need to be watched, rest assured that you are being watched.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Human error and incompatible bureaucracies will be the two things preventing 1984 from ever truly coming true...
Instead we'll see Brazil...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The Bureau had "no comment."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Maybe the missing suggestion is just still being evaluated and considered. I mean Following 11 suggestions and rejecting 4 says nothing to any that they haven't agreed to follow or rejected yet.
It might be different if they said something more like agreed to 11 but rejected the other four. But as if now, they have only made statements about 15 of the 16 suggestions and those statements were limited in scope.
They invaded our privacy already and didn't have to pay for it. I think that's a good step toward profitability by lowering costs. Next step is an increase in regular consumer bills to offset the losses and to cover the eventual lawsuits. Result is, we pay to spy on ourselves.
rewriting history since 2109
Contrary to what you might think, the US government isn't engaged in some grand and nefarious conspiracy to expand its extra-constitutional powers. It is, however, engaged in a grand conspiracy to win elections. Simply put, a politician that declares him/herself "tough on child porn", promises "tough measures" and actually delivers them is much more likely to get reelected than a politician that appears "soft on child porn" because they dare to say, "Uh... the federal government doesn't have the right to wiretap the entire US populace, even if it is to eliminate child porn." Until that's fixed, which would require a major attitude adjustment on the part of the electorate (not happening), we're going to get more of this kind of thing. As for Iraqi children, I've never been a big fan of the argument, "Because X is broken in Y third world country, we should fix that first before we fix X' in our country", whether we caused it or not. For starters, just because the rest of the world is messed up, it doesn't mean we have to be. Secondly, we have 300 million people in this country - it's not like we can't do multiple things simultaneously. As for whether we caused women and children to die in Iraq, well, yes, some did die by our bullets, but, unlike Saddam's regime or the fundamentalist fiefdoms that have sprouted up in the wake of the invasion, it's not standard operating procedure with us. By the way, given a choice between getting raped or dying... well, let's just hope that's a false choice. At least dying has the advantage of being final - getting raped leads to your entire life being screwed up 'til you're dead.
If we can't take care of our own, how can we possibly police the rest of the world? I agree that the tragedies overseas are important, but the purpose of a government is to take care of its own citizens first.
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
It just goes to show that small amounts of money speak louder than millions of angry citizens. The latter hasn't ended one wiretap, the former halted it immediately.
...that 'government doesn't work' and 'government causes more problems than it solves'.
Or, at least, that applies to their government.
If I worked in the FBI, I'd be pissed. An agent go to all the work to collect evidence and get a real warrant for wiretapping and start it up and run the recordings every few days and suddenly, they discover that the wiretap has been cut off and not got anything for two days, and I bet it takes it a week to get back turned on.
Not because of any law, they're used to laws protecting rights and are trained how to work within the system of 'probable cause'. Not because the higher-ups have decided the investigation is a waste of time and the resources are better spent elsewhere, which is very annoying but understandable, and usually has a schedule: Get something by this date or it's over.
No, their investigation is derailed because the people running the FBI, the DOJ, and the rest of the executive branch can't pay their bills on time. Because they're incompetent buffoons. (I am aware Robert Mueller seems rather competent, but I'm assuming the failure was elsewhere...he's surely not in charge of paying bills.)
Ironically, the first word in the FBI motto is 'Fidelity', one meaning of which is 'careful and exact discharge of obligations'. (Hence financial services using it as a name.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
B) Cheap
C) Properly
Pick two.
Which two do you think the government picked?
Hint: Accountability & oversight are expensive and slow
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!