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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
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.
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...
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.
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!
In 2008, they said if I voted for John McCain my civil liberties would be further eroded for sake of the safety of the State. My freedoms would be restricted without legislation with the complicity of the courts....
And they were right!
Get off my lawn.
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.
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...
Well since you have no freedom to begin with (unless of course you are a billionaire), it actually costs very little. All that's happening is the veil is slowly falling. But never kid yourself that the government has not always had the power to break you. That's what government IS.
Not so. It didn't used to have anything like that kind of power: up 'til the Second World War the United States Federal Government was tiny compared to its current incarnation, and didn't control most of the nation's wealth. Only since World War II has the government been a threat to its citizens on the kind of scale we're seeing today. Even the FBI, which went way overboard during the Fifties, was reigned in by the Congress of the time. Many of the protections put in place then were removed by the Patriot Act, which has still not been allowed to sunset (Congress isn't what it used to be either.)
Sooner or later, I suspect that my more liberal-minded friends are going to see the Second Amendment as one of the Founders' better ideas. Right now, they still buy into the ideal that they're untouchable, and that the government is still worthy of the trust they place in it, that they really have nothing to worry about. A feeling of complacency, borne largely of willful ignorance.
I'm a ways from retirement now, but not that far, and I hope we can keep it together until I'm six feet under. but I don't hold out much hope of that. See, the problem with decadent empires (you have only to look at pretty much every empire that ever existed, whether it be economic or military) is that when the end comes, it comes faster than anyone believed possible. Some inflection point is reached, stability is lost, and said empire is rapidly overtaken by its enemies. We may have already past that point: to a certain degree we are now operating on inertia.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.