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White House Wants Phone Records Without Oversight
An anonymous reader writes "The Obama administration's Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the US without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy."
LOL, all of your presidents and their administrations are the same.
same as the old boss
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Egypt puts you to shame.
Free World my ass.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
They told me if I voted for McCain the president would want "illegal" wiretapping privileges! And they were right!
By what legal sophistry is this allowed under the Pen Registry Act ? These blatant end-runs around existing law are obnoxious and insulting. If they feel the law is too restrictive, I have no doubts that the Congress would be all too willing to oblige them, but I wish they would stop this BS.
It's been a pretty publicly known for many, many years now that the US has tapped international telephone cables. Histories of submarine espionage like Blind Man's Bluff go into some detail. There was no uproar then about listening in on people's private calls -- and some of these lines had US traffic going through them. The American public is pretty forgiving as long as the administration claims that it's happening off of US soil and is for a good cause.
You have to realize that obeying laws can be uncomfortable or even get in the way if you're doing Gods own work in the government. While we can always create laws that exempt us specifically, it's hard and cumbersome and sometimes takes valuable time. Therefore, it is in everybody's interest if we do away with this complication and have laws apply to ordinary citizens only in the future. There are way too many of them and they are way too complicated already.
Honestly, unless there is something huge that I don't know about, I just don't get how the information gained this way could be worth the cost of our freedom. This is just so sad!
When I was campaigning for this man, who is now the president, I had hoped he would turn back the clock and fix the over reaching of his predecessors. So naive! I'm ashamed of myself for HOPING. I should have know it would just be the same shit, different day.
So according to TFA, the FBI is claiming "a section of a 1978 federal wiretapping law" gives them the power to ask about phone records. TFA does not actually say what section that might be. TFA then goes on to speculate on the (il)legality of phone companies handing over records, again without any further information or even consideration for any revisions since 1978. Apparently, "experts" say that these laws are being misinterpreted by the FBI. There's no mention of a lawsuit, no mention of anything more than speculation.
That's great, guys. Please keep up the good work, fight the good fight, et cetera, but wait until you have something concrete and informative before you publish.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
You got it!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Can we now dispense with the myth of the 2-party system?
There is one party -- the party of you're going to get fucked and you're going to like it.
The two faces of this party manufacture differences to keep Americans at each other's throats. There probably are ideological differences somewhere buried, and they certainly talk differently during campaign time.
But they are remarkably similar in how they actually behave: scratch the backs that scratched them, put the screws to the companies that don't play ball, put the screws to the vanishingly small subset of "normal Americans", who don't have some other group-identifying prefix or suffix.
Add to that, cooperate with or live in ignorance of the fact that the money printers and bankers really run the show, and don't forget: expand federal government power and run ripshod over the core principles and civil liberties that set this nation apart at its founding (who reads history, anyway?) , and finally, almost all politicians of any flavor agree that the answer to every problem is to say YES to EVERYBODY, thereby having the best shot of re-election.
I didn't and don't like Obama's professed worldview: I think he's much too redistributionist for my tastes, but then, I'm more individualist than Ayn Rand. But enough about me.
Obama was supposed to FIX at least _some_ of the shit that GWB did badly. He was supposed to draw down troop deployments, he was supposed to get rid of our "parallel" justice system where torture and kidnapping and indefinite incarceration and no trials are all fine and dandy. He was supposed to give back some of the 4th amendment.
He has done none of those things, and infact, on all fronts, has made them worse.
Nearly everything that GWB was doign wrong, Obama has continued or made worse.
I hope the Obama administration thus far has been a wake-up call for people who were looking for 180 degree turn.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
you could have voted for Kucinich, Gravel, or Paul and gotten genuine and positive change in these areas. Oh, but today's Tammany Hall said those choices weren't "serious" and that they "couldn't win".
it's time to form a new center that actually gives a damn out of the far right and far left.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/02/09/tea_party/index.html
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I think it's time to retire the "In Soviet Russia..." comments and replace them with "In Democratic America..." No, really...
I guess you can take consolation in the fact that the end result would be the same regardless of who you campaigned for. Just like a football game, it doesn't matter which team you prefer, at the end of the day the players are still going to go home with a lot more money than you are.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Is much larger than *any* one person. This just goes to show that once you get to Washington you are just swept away by the beast.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It seems that the summary omitted once crucial detail -- The FBI may request the information and it may voluntarily be given. However, to demand it still requires an intervention from the courts.
There is nothing new here. If your phone company chooses to give information about you to the FBI or some other government agency, you may have a gripe with the phone company, but the government can't just come in a compel the phone company to give up that information without a court order.
So now what? You give up?
What you should have learned is that you can't pin your hopes on a superstar to fix a systemic problem.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
PGP Phone.
The only thing this is going to do is catch a few minor criminals that may call Mexico/Canada for their weed.
Any real terrorist is going to encrypt what they're doing.
Hell, thinking about it right now, if I was a terrorist and I wanted to start sending coded messages, I'd start with craigslist. Put some 'orders'/messages in an image with steganography (encrypted of course), and just let it go by word of mouth that orders for the attack should be looking for a 1974 Blue Camero. They decrypt the orders and carry on.
Is it really that different? Any data as to how many times the FBI (or similar) is denied a 4th (or Nth) amendment-breaching request?
In practice, and given the "parallel" justice system that is being employed and growing in the USA, it seems like it is very simple to circumvent authority by invoking "enemy of the state" or "national security" arbitrarily. So why should it matter anyway?
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Remember the good old days when we could hate Bush for this pine for the days when a Democrat in office would save us?
(sigh, good times... good times...)
When she calls me in Europe from the US?
Mom: "Are you getting enough to eat?"
Me: "Yes, mom, I live Western Europe, not the Western Sahara."
Mom: "How's the weather over there?"
Me: "It's fine, mom."
Mom: "Are you getting enough to eat?"
Me: "You already asked me that, mom."
The scene switches to the NSA headquarters, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland.
NSA Chief Analyst: "There must be some kind of code there. She keeps asking him, "Are you getting enough to eat?" What does that mean? Assign a team to crack this code. And the reference to the Western Sahara? Call the CIA and get their agents in the Western Sahara to snoop around, there must be something going on there . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
How long until internet traffic to foreign websites becomes constantly monitored by the FBI, using this same justification? And after that, how long until all internet traffic becomes constantly monitored? Lovely.
that's one reason why I prefer a congress from the other party. it would be great if citizens cared enough to tell the white house no, but we don't so I'll settle for the other party doing it just for spite (they'd agree too often if the president is their party)
I agree. The president is simply the head of the Armed forces. I never expect him/her to do any sort of ( IP | legal | health care | human rights ) reform -- The president of the USA, much like President Zaphod Beeblebrox, is simply a distraction to keep us from concentrating our attention on where we can actually make such changes (i.e. every other position of government, EXCEPT the presidency).
When will they just discard with the formalities and just say that every goverment agency can do anything whatsoever with no warrants and paperwork required. It would simplify the law too, they could sum it up in one sentence: "Everything is illegal".
NO YOU CANNOT YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!!! illegal blah blah blah unconstitutional blah blah blah probably gonna do it anyway because hes a fucking douchebag from another country blah blahblahhopesomeonegetsenoughgumptiontoputsomeleadinhisdietblahblahblah...
-Oz
A opposed to the Bush administration, which harbored far-right members and WAS a terrorist organization? See? Hyperbole rolls both ways.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
If anyone has mod points anymore...
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Are you really, seriously going to maintain that voting for Kucinich would have been a vote more for 'a new center' than Obama. Kuninich is a left-end kook.
GWB was a misguided buffoon with evil, extremely connected people pulling his strings. GWB really IS a "compassionate conservative" and a born-again Christian who thinks that anyone can be redeemed (Huckabee is the same. He doesn't pardon murderers for the purpose of furthering his career. He's scary too however).
Obama is to the right of Nixon, but due to the extremely negative media coverage portraying him as being to the left of Marx he gets cover to sign off on shit like this. Obama was supposed to be better than the average politician even if it meant he would be less effective. He wasn't supposed to be cynical. In practice however Obama is the most cynical president in history; a Clinton-style gamesman. "But, Clinton didn't do that bad outside of the DMCA and bombing an aspirin factory!", yeah, that was with the Republicans imploding during his presidency due to the government shutdown and Americans finding the circus of the Monica scandal repulsive. The popular media (Fox/Drudge/Most local newspapers) is far more hostile to Obama than it ever was to Clinton. The Senate/House makeup and the general mindset of "defeat anything with Obama's name attached to it" among the GOP means we're going to get a shittier form of Clinton.
No economic boom, no sane legislation passing unmolested through both houses, but you bet your ass every "the MPAA can came to your house and literally rape you" or "The government reserves the right to legally disappear you forever" law will make it through.
TL;DR: Death is Certain.
So how stupid is this? If the person calling is a criminal this isn't needed at all. And what if I call Osama every other day? I land on a no-fly list? (even though calling Osama is not a crime...) Great to have a free country with democracy and fair trial for criminals so the people can live without fear...
it's kooky to want out of our foreign imbroglios? it's kooky to allow failed businesses to fail? those sound like pretty good things to me. you act as though there wouldn't have been a congress much like the one that was elected along side the president to keep the president from doing some things.
personally i consider all our security theater kooky *and* extremely wasteful of money, resources, and time. i consider our obsession with perfect safety to the exclusion of all other values to be kooky. i consider our neo-isolationism (mistrust of all foreigners and imposition of insane hurdles on their visits (USVISIT) to be kooky. setting policy that encourages using corn for biodiesel when sugar is far more efficient and corn is a staple food in shortage is kooky. i could go on, but clearly you have an agenda that is not driven by actual concern but by preserving the status quo, no matter how kooky or doomed to failure it is.
i'm sorry, but your concern trolling is not helping anyone.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I didn't know that laws were just for private citizens. What's good for the goose isn't good for the gander I guess. This kinda makes sense though, Bush's warrantless wiretapping was found to be illegal, Obama excused it, and now he's seeking to make what was illegal into something legal. But not for private citizens. Now I get it, "shackles" is merely a metaphor.
Twinstiq, game news
I agree with most of your post except this. You're spot on that Obama has mostly failed to do what he promised.
put the screws to the vanishingly small subset of "normal Americans", who don't have some other group-identifying prefix or suffix.
Who are these people? How, exactly, are people with group-identifying prefixes or suffixes benefiting or escaping being screwed in the same way? Can you name something specific? Women who have children outside of wedlock with no way to pay for their babies would fit within your rhetoric, but I have a sinking feeling you probably weren't thinking of them as one of your prefix/suffix groups. Maybe you were, I don't know.
Where are the "normal Americans" going? Are they being recruited to become abnormal Americans? What groups are they being recruited into?
Don't mix up xenophobic (homophobic?) paranoia with otherwise valid points. I happen to have a group-identifying prefix. It's given me some interesting experiences (that you can read about in my other posts), yet I hope some day I can drop it. However I need to cough up the cash myself to get surgery done that will let me drop that label (nobody wants to be caught helping someone with my group prefix, even my health insurance, which would rather buy me a new liver if I continue making the choice to drink like a fish rather than helping me with something I was born with), so it's not going to happen tomorrow or next week no matter how much I want it. Even then, some people would prefer that I not be able to drop it, so that they can refuse me service, but whatever—it's a free market, and I don't want to give my money to those people anyway when I can go across the street and get customer service that doesn't care if I'm a lizard monster from Neptune.
I have a job. I pay my taxes. I applied for Selective Service because of another group-identifying label I have to live with. I vote (and not for Republicans or Democrats, either, unless those are the only two parties running for a certain office). I contribute to local food pantries, although every time I hear a chest-pounding red-blooded American saying something like this, I question why I do so when I could be putting the money in my savings account instead. I like eating steaks and chicken wings. I'd donate blood, but my blood isn't good to the Red Cross (because of said group-identifying prefix), so whatever.
What, exactly, constitutes a "normal American?" Do HIV-negative homosexuals fit in? Do HIV-positive women fit in? Do children born HIV-positive fit in? Well, I suppose the last two are mostly a problem in Africa, not North America. Does a straight guy living in his father's basement with no job and no education fit in? What are the criteria?
I have a feeling we might just wind up seeing eye-to-eye, but every time I hear this idea that the "normal" group is vanishing and that special groups are somehow benefiting or at least doing better than the "normal" group, I get a chill up my spine. There are assholes out there who believe I'm receiving money from some magical government program that only exists in their minds, and I've had a business owner try to steal from my friends before on that basis. Well, I don't know that for sure, but something made him think he could take their money and then refuse to give them their order. He called the cops to have us escorted out, and when the cops showed up, they didn't quite see it the way he'd expected. But I'm sure he was just a victim of some special privilege my friends or I have as part of whatever group he thought we were in since the cops wouldn't let him effectively steal my friends' money. And hey, the best part of that story is that the cops didn't even need to do anything for me to decide to never give him my money again! In fact, I posted a warning to others who might be in my group several places on the internet to avoid his business. Win-win!
Cheers
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Is there anything the FBI does that does not subvert the 4th Amendment?
I agree. The president is simply the head of the Armed forces. I never expect him/her to do any sort of ( IP | legal | health care | human rights ) reform -- The president of the USA, much like President Zaphod Beeblebrox, is simply a distraction to keep us from concentrating our attention on where we can actually make such changes (i.e. every other position of government, EXCEPT the presidency).
Not to mention all the non-elected officials and bureaucrats who often remain in their jobs long after the elected officials who appointed them have retired or been voted out.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
http://www.eff.org/cases/hepting
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Hopefully the Tea Party (the real one, not the Koch/Palin/Armey astroturf) keeps at it and picks up some more lefties
As long as people keep spreading the myth that any of the Tea Party is astroturf, it will be slow going indeed.
The reality is that the idea the Tea Party is in any way astroturf is itself a concept crafted wholly by the media and organizations who do not like the tea party (and that's not just liberal organizations, though they are the majority).
The Tea Party is about fiscal conservatism and limited government. A smaller government is one less likely to intrude. Basically if you value privacy there is no way in which a smaller government is not the better government to have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How would this apply to VoIP phone records? Skype calls? MSN Live calls? There are international calls which get switched via US carriers. Are those subject to this privacy grab? For example, I've got Canadian customers who use US VoIP carriers to place overseas calls. I've got Canadian customers whose Canadian customer may choose to use a US route for least-cost-routing, unbeknownst to them. Is this just for PSTN or cell calls? By extension, all data packets going through the US will wind up getting monitored.
Isn't the whole point of campaigning to pick up girls? In particular, the sort of girls who care about anything besides their new shoes.
There are many things you can do to really make a difference, like volunteering for good organizations, donating money to good causes like wikileaks, EFF, ACLU, amnesty international, etc., participating in Anonymous protests, or just posting news stories like this on your facebook. Your vote for a democratic candidate isn't directly to bring about change however. It's simply to increase the probability that anyone listens to the organizations that are actually trying to bring about change.
Obama has done absolutely nothing to reign in abuse of power in law enforcement. Not sure what president ever has. To accomplish that, you'd need to change the way people think about law enforcement.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Any act of congress that purports to allow any officer to ignore the fourth amendment is unconstitutional, and is therefore not a law at all. The government frequently ignores the constitutional limitations on its powers, but the constitution is nevertheless the entirety of the legal basis for the existence of the federal government.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Did you really think that a man who got his training in politics as a cog in the Chicago Machine would be in favor of weakening government's ability to do whatever it wanted regardless of what the law said? If so, shame on you!
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Who gives a toss? It's only America - in 50 years time it will be even more of a "has been" country & China will be the "leading player", hopefully they will refrain from invading any country with resources it covets.
Sweetie, Hitler was a Christian. At least, he used Christian rhetoric on his way to gain power.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
What does this have to do with a "liberal" agenda? I'm upset about this because it isn't a liberal thing to do.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
"All things not compulsory are forbidden."
-- old Soviet jape
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Seems that it is becoming reality slowly but surely. Or
Larry King: How do we draw the line - draw the line between protection of national security, obviously the government's need to obtain intelligence data, and the protection of civil liberties, particularly the sanctity of my home? You've got no right to come into my home!
Get out of my home! Get out of my cellphone! See dutch police use stealth sms.
Carla Dean: Well, who's gonna monitor the monitors of the monitors?
Looks like nobody is monitoring what Obama is doing.
Govts all over the world - just remember the end of the movie - the bad guys all die because of their greed for power and control.
Obama - just wait until you find a monitoring device in your own bedroom. Then it will not be so funny anymore.
And for what purpose? And most important, how in God's green earth it got into President Obama's bedroom! Listen people, everyone knows where this is going. If this was a legit op, and I can't imagine how it could be, then so be it. But if this was someone's unilateral wet dream, then that someone is going to prison.
Yeah, and you and your parents asses were being saved by ours before you were born.
Word!
This is nothing new in my opinion, These offices has long had the ability to obtain such records after Bush's mega major hyper security alert to make the country secure - after 9/11 - not just records are likely to be on their hands just sayin'
Seriously. Obtaining telephone records is not the same as a wiretap. When they say they can obtain telephone records without a legal process or court oversight, it basically means they can find out what international telephone numbers were called by a given US telephone number over a given time period. That's it. If they then want to tap and listen in on that US telephone number, they must go through the proper legal process and obtain court authority. So stop being such alarmist d-bags.
Maybe if we could suddenly, miraculous realize there are more than two parties in this country and some of them actually have principles...not many but one or two...
I think it has nothing to do with terrorists -- they're after WikiLeakers, who pose a clear and present danger to a corrupt and inept government that relies of a lack of transparency in order to continue to operate the way that they have for the past several decades.
You should finish reading the comment before making judgment. See the third, forth and fifth sentences.
This is completely reasonable and not at all like GWB. The capacity to intercept and seize international communications is supported by pretty extensive precedents.