The NSA Wiretapping Story Nobody Wanted

CWmike writes "They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you're dead. The cliché doesn't seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein's new book, Wiring up the Big Brother Machine ... and Fighting It. It's an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans. Amazingly, however, nobody wanted to hear his story. In his book he talks about meetings with reporters and privacy groups that went nowhere until a fateful January 20, 2006 meeting with Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Bankston was preparing a lawsuit that he hoped would put a stop to the wiretap program, and Klein was just the kind of witness the EFF was looking for. He spoke with Robert McMillan for an interview."

Comments

Not even Barack Obama

[SethJohnson]

Apparently, even President Obama doesn't want to hear complaints about the warrantless wiretaps. The Computerworld story provides a convenient link titled "Obama administration defends Bush wiretapping"

While campaigning against President George W. Bush, Barack Obama had pledged that there would be "no more wiretapping of American citizens," but Obama's administration has continued to use many of his predecessor's arguments when it comes to warrantless wiretapping.

Ok, perhaps the reporter of that story got a few of the facts wrong. (George W. Bush != John McCain)

Seth

Re:Not even Barack Obama

[crazyjimmy]

With regards to the back flip carried out by Obama when he became president (where he changed from opposing the wiretaps to supporting them), the logical explanation is that when he became president the NSA showed him details of the wiretapping and possibly also showed him examples of things the NSA has intercepted via the wiretapping that has in some way benefited the national security of the nation or helped in the war on terror. Having seen that this wiretapping is actually producing beneficial results, he would then be more inclined to keep it going so it can keep producing these results.

Or perhaps the NSA offered to post transcripts of every embarrassing conversation Obama had ever had.

Re:Not even Barack Obama

[drinkypoo]

With regards to the back flip carried out by Obama when he became president (where he changed from opposing the wiretaps to supporting them)

There was no such flip. Obama ALWAYS supported warrantless wiretaps. How do I know? He voted for telecoms immunity. He had some bullshit excuse about it, but no excuse is possible. Believing Obama was ever against those wiretaps is fucking stupid. Check the voting record, understand that you have been duped, and move on.

Obama supported these wiretaps before becoming president:

The law that Congress passed last summer, with the support of then-Sen. Barack Obama, authorized the wiretap program and sought to dismiss lawsuits against companies that had participated.

Believing politicians' campaign promises only makes YOU an idiot. It says nothing about them.

Re:I question a key point from TFA

[Kreigaffe]

You're right on both parts, essentially. I think they also were monitoring calls originating in the US that were made to foreign numbers they believed to have ties with terrorism, too, but honestly it's hard to really figure out what the truth is and was with so much fear-mongering and hyperbole going on.

Oh, and the program itself wasn't really new, it's been around forever. Bush & Co. just tweaked the rules around a little bit -- a move that I think was less about invading the privacy of Americans (which they've been able to do for several decades now) and more a matter of removing a bottleneck. The whole secret wiretap deal has to be approved by a secret court, I think there's a 24 or 48 hour window in which they can start a wiretap and then seek approval by this secret court. Well, in the wake of 9/11, they were using this quite a bit, and I'm of the belief that they circumvented the court not because they wanted to be Big Brother but because they knew that most these wiretaps would NOT result in any information but felt that at the time it was best to cast as wide a net as possible, immediately, and later worry about narrowing things down from "possible" to "likely".

The secret court, of course, only would be able to review so many requests for secret wiretaps at once, and if you're looking at a list of 1,000 possibles and you think 100 of them are pretty likely, let's say it would take a week for a court (and you) to go through and decide which of those 1,000 were the ones you wanted.. well, I believe the idea was simply to not worry about the time limit due to the huge volume and keep all the wiretaps in place until some sort of review could be done, rather than potentially miss out on valuable information because of a paperwork bottleneck.

Not that I really care for the idea of secret courts or meetings or wiretaps or anything, but overblown fearmongering and fingerpointing pisses me off even more. Especially when it's hypocritical fingerpointing. It's not like the democrats in power were oblivious to what was going on (see also, criticism of the information on WMDs before the Iraq War from the democrats when in fact they had access and agreed with the intelligence reports at the time.. fucking i'll-have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too bullshit).

of course they didn't want it

[dnwq]

Think about it this way. The news is public, now. Do you see any frothing outrage, outside of a few fringe activist groups? Outside of Slashdot? No?

There doesn't seem to be any real interest now, so there definitely wouldn't be any then, in the with-us-or-against-us environment in the years immediately after 9/11. So how would a newspaper or media outlet gain by breaking the story? It'll just instantly lose all its government contacts, but not gain any new readership. Why would anyone publish it?

Re:Its about time.

[drinkypoo]

It seems like every time we get into position to do something about government abuse of the people all coverage suddenly stops.

Nobody in the US fucking cares. If this kind of thing happens in Spain or France (two nations with terrible records on privacy) then you'll see people rioting in the streets and throwing bricks through telecom windows.