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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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
Well, fsck. Guess I'll have to quit my job, move to Montana and live out in the middle of the woods where no one can find me...wait? What did you say? The Unabomber. Sh*t. Time to move to Australia. Is there a big demand for sysadmins in Australia?
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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.
The point of all this blanket monitoring is not to secure convictions of suspected terrorists. The old FISA law was completely adequate for that purpose.
The purpose here is to make the American public toe the line, and for that purpose, convictions are not necessary. The mere threat of action, with the associated social embarrassment and financial hardship, will do nicely.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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?
This is my favorite. Marine Staff Sgt. Daniel Brown was blocked from flying while on his way home from an 8-month deployment in Iraq. He was listed as a suspected terrorist due to a previous incident in which gunpowder was detected on his boots, most likely a residue of a previous tour in Iraq. I was actually held for 2 hours once because one of the people in airport security because I smelt like gasoline. I was returning home from a business trip and I had to fill up a rental car with gas. There was some gasoline residue on my shoes. Do I really need to be searched and treated like a criminal for filling up a car with gas?
Somewhere in a dark place you will find:
www.m1
Sadly, that sounds about accurate. A co-worker of my wife has a husband who is doing federal time and is labeled as a domestic terrorist. You know what he did? He and a couple friends tried to blow up a port-a-potty in the middle of the night.
Stupid? yep. Irresponsible? Yep. Terrorism? Only if damned near everyone I knew in highschool is a terrorist for doing similarly stupid and destructive crap.
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.
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.