Slashdot Mirror
FBI Hid Patriot Act Abuses
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Wired is reporting that the FBI hid Patriot Act abuses with retroactive and flawed subpoenas, and used them to illegally acquire phone and credit card records. There were at least 11 retroactive, 'blanket' subpoenas that were signed by top counter-terrorism officials, some of which sought information the FBI is not allowed to have. The FBI's Communication Analysis Unit also had secret contracts with AT&T, Verizon and MCI, and abused National Security Letters by issuing subpoenas based on fake emergencies."
How many people will lose their jobs/careers/freedom for these transgressions?
None.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Well, I guess we no longer need to argue back and forth over the "slippery slope" of giving the government access to stuff it shouldn't have access to.
The case is closed - the government will abuse any power it has access to.
As Bruce Schneider says, what we do not need is security at the expense of liberty and privacy - we need liberty, security, *and* privacy.
I don't know why the FBI even bothers to try to hide its wrongdoing...after all, this administration has made it very clear that they are above the law, and that anyone who joins them in their abuses can enjoy a comparable freedom from responsibility.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Needed with 1 in 300 being a terrorist
With one out of three people being a terrorist, I think we should all be gratefull that they are doing whatever it takes to get their jobs done:
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/spying/watchlistcounter.html?=main
Seriously, I said all along that they didn't care anything about catching terrorist...that it was just smoke and mirrors to monitor us. And low and behold, they will get to monitor us legally, as one out of three of us is a terrorist.
If this doesn't scare the hell out of you, I don't know what will.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Of oourse, it gives those convicted using such information grounds for appeal. The evidence gathered could be thrown out and their convictions overturned.
The FBI should know better.
My blog
Democracy is just a set of checks and balances to prevent that. We wouldn't need to elect leaders and stuff if it wouldn't be for that. We actually don't need so many new laws in our day-to-day lives. All we would need is a good lawbook to start from and police to enforce it. But since power will always be abused we need that complicated thing called democracy to be able to get rid of people that abuse too much.
By removing checks and balances (which is currently done in almost all democracies all over the world for no reason) we see an upsurge of abuse.
So nothing to see here, please move along.
There's a big difference between being asked for communications to or from an internet account or phone and being given unfettered access to all provider traffic.
So - all you guys with guns, who maintain that they can protect us from a corrupt government. Where are you? We need some protecting from a corrupt government.
No one is seriously in favor of wiping out all security and simply letting crime happen as it wills. There is a reason we need the FBI, military, and local and state police departments. We all agree that crime prevention and the provision of justice is one service that government must provide. Otherwise we would live in anarchy, and even though the thought of vigilante justice is attractive to some, we for the most part believe that their must be a social framework upon which we want to build our culture. This necessitates a government and the responsibilities both of and to it.
To that end, the expansion of police powers at the top levels of the government is not necessarily a bad thing. When we look at 9/11 and the failure of communication between various law enforcement agencies, it is clear that we cannot have a law enforcement system where one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing. The Patriot Act, for all its faults, is trying to address this need by opening up and sharing the law enforcement databases so that vital information is not overlooked or ignored simply because it is not available. The implementation has left a lot to be desired, though.
When we start to expand federal powers, such as like and under the Patriot Act, great care must be taken to provide oversight capable of taking the power wielder to task. Normally, you'd expect this to be Congress. But much more fundamentally, you would expect the President (the Chief Executive) to show some restraint and good sense in the execution of the expanded powers. What we have unfortunately seen is that the President has not seen fit to restrain the DHS and has not forced common sense and common decency as policy. Rather, the departments have run wild creating new and more intrusive rights for themselves at the expense of American freedoms.
We say we are the beacon of the world, but we have not lived up to that moniker here at home, and we have destroyed our good name abroad. We must start our transformation immediately back into that beacon, and we must start at home.
"they were illegally requested to do things in a way that may have appeared valid to their legal council"
If their legal council couldn't bother to verify what was going on before bending over and accepting this, then there's a whole other issue that needs to be dealt with. But that's besides the point. They (the telcos) did something heinously wrong, and now they deserve to be punished.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
Prior to the Patriot act, only the NSA was tapping our phones without a proper warrent. Now, we have the NSA, DOD, AND the DOJ hitting it. The ppl at the NSA have no real power to arrest ppl. More importantly, prior to W. they never shared their data with others EXCEPT when there is a reason. That means that they did not use their knowledge to affect regular citizens.
OTH, the DOJ has ALWAYS abused their powers. ALWAYS. WHy? We have combined the ability to arrest, with the mentality to be a guarddog, the ethics of a Republican, and now with the ability to listen in on all. No wonder that they will lie, cheat and steal to achieve their goals. This is a group that now believes the ends justify the means. Very bad set-up. That is why DOJ must not have these spying abilities.
Finally, the DOD is now looking through our lines. The problem is not that they are likely to use it against a citizen, but that they will use the knowledge to affect their future. IOW, they can now listen in on conversations between gov. ppl. This is part of the industrial-military complex that also needs to be stopped.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Seriously, Clinton gets a bj in office and gets impeached. Bush recklessly gets us into a war for no factual reason, destroys the economy, slashes and burns the constitution and nothing happens. The FBI abuses the patriot act, the NSA initiates a domestic spying program, and nothing happens. WTF America? Don't any of you have any pride or perspective anymore?
"when the corruption comes from the top down, it's hard to determine what's right/legal and what isn't"
No it isn't, that is what laws are for. Break the law and you have done something illegal, it is no more difficult than that. That is why companies have legal departments. Appeared valid to their legal department? ALL of their legal departments? Nonsense.
If someone tries to sell you a unregistered hand gun from the trunk of a car in an alley and you buy it, you are just as guilty as the person who sold it to you. Just because you are asked to do something illegal doesn't mean that you are innocent under the law if you do it. The absolute BEST they could hope for is calling it entrapment. But I don't think an entrapment argument would hold up when the ones asking them to break the law weren't trying to get them on a crime, they just wanted help with their own criminal activity.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
I would take this a step further. If their legal council bent over and accepted this, they should be examined by the Bar Association for incompetancy.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Not to mention that it has been long accepted that ignorance of the law is not a valid defense for violating it.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
The Homeland Security people say they've laid a serious hurtin' on the terrorists, they just can't tell us anything about it for obvious reasons. And there have been no more attacks on American soil, which absolutely proves that they're doing everything right because otherwise all those terrorists they keep telling us about would be eating our babies right this very minute.
So it's all OK and we should just quit worrying, because even though they legalized everything short of grabbing people off the street and exporting them to other countries for torture (Oh, wait a minute...) it would all be in our best interest because they're the good guys.
So I guess what I'm saying is: lay off the FBI, because they know best and you guys are just making their job harder by pointing out that they're abusing their powers. And that's just wrong. Better we live on our knees than die on our feet and all that, because if there's another attack then the terrorists have won and the United States will have turned into a police state for nothing.
And wouldn't that suck...
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I read this too soon after waking up, and I thought the title read: FBI HID Patriot Act Abuses. I couldn't for the life of me understand how the FBI could possibly abuse my mouse.
http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559597
I don't see a whole lot of green and blue on this map. Greece is doing pretty good. Granted, it's disappointing that USA ranks right up their with Russia and China, but you can't really expect much privacy anywhere unless you take steps to ensure it yourself (GPG, Tor, Freenet, etc).
IMHO the trend we're seeing is the downside of moving to an information-based society: if information is free for the taking, you betcha they're going to take it. Governments have been spying on citizens since there were governments, regardless of any policy-based protections; getting all wired up just makes things easier.
The argument goes something like this:
The claim is that if companies had the right/obligation to say something to the effect of "Hmmm
And, if they tell you what they've been up to, then the terrorists will know what our capabilities are, and we'll never catch them.
It really is an astonishingly scary example of exactly why the erosion of the checks and balances that everyone said would happen, were a bad idea in the first place. The government gave themselves sweeping (and, arguably unconstitutional) powers after 9/11 -- at the time, everyone said it would lead to abuses. It has.
The current strategy of the government is to prevent it from coming under scrutiny, and to ensure those that they recruited to help with this stuff have no consequences -- because if you were allowed to know everything that would happen, you'd be appalled and they'd look like even more like people who ran rough shod over the laws. They don't want everyone to know what they've been doing.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...and we know what happens when it is set too far in the direction of limiting the actions of the FBI about "information they aren't allowed to have". Try googling "Gorelick wall". For a really interesting take on coverups, read about how the woman whose policies made 9/11 possible also sat on the 9/11 Commission. Interesting.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
-- QED
Patriot Act hides FBI Abuse!
Oh, those cagey bees! The party has found you.
Can we just start calling the FBI by it's proper name? Is that Stasi, NKVD or the KGB.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
You're thinking about this wrong.
With blanket immunity, all civil trials will stop completely.
Without blanket immunity, the civil trials will expose any wrong doings that did occur. If the telcos were persuaded illegally by law enforcement to commit wrong doing, then such evidence will be used in oversight and criminal investigations against the law enforcement offices and officers themselves.
Analogy time:
1. A cop threatens to kidnap/disappear you unless you kill someone.
2. You kill that someone and now face trial for the murder.
Two outcomes:
A. the cop 'silences' you before trial.
B. the cop has serious connections and manages to get you immunity, hoping you shut up about the whole affair.
To protect the law enforcement offices, they have to protect the telcos.
Don't think about this as some cultural thing: it's strictly about covering up previous wrong doing. If it happens to allow for future wrong doing, well that's just an added bonus.
This is not my sig
Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti translates to Committee for State Security which is eerily the same name as the Department of Homeland Security. For those who do not bother with changing the full name to the acronym, the Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti is more commonly(at least in the United States) known as the KGB.
Just a thought.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.