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The NSA: Never Not Watching
Trailrunner7 writes "For many observers of the privacy and surveillance landscape, the revelation by The Guardian that the FBI received a warrant from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to require Verizon to turn over to the National Security Agency piles of call metadata on all calls on its network probably felt like someone telling them that water is wet. There have been any number of signals in the last few years that this kind of surveillance and data collection was going on, little indications that the United States government was not just spying on its own citizens, but doing so on a scale that would dwarf anything that all but the most paranoid would imagine." And now the Obama administration has defended the practice as a "critical tool."
It's what authorizes legitimate government. Anyone think this is authorized? 4th amendment? Anyone?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not only is the Executive branch in favor, but there's strong bipartisan support in the Legislative branch: immediately after this leak, both parties' ranking members on the Senate Intelligence Committee (Dianne Feinstein for the Democrats, Saxby Chambliss for the Republicans) held a press conference to defend the necessity of this kind of dragnet surveillance, and to claim that it's not a big deal since it's "just" metadata.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Seriously, I thought it was fairly common knowledge that the NSA had a 'who knows who' database sense before AT&T was broken up.
No matter how careful you are about not leaving tracks the government knows about who you are by who you regularly call.
For example, I've never been arrested. But the government knows I'm not a stinking law abider because, basically, none of the people I'm in regular contact with are god damn law abiders.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yeah, I think we know who the tool is.
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As someone who frequently gets accused of having the tinfoil hat on a little snug, this is pretty much the worst case scenario.
"We're going to monitor everything, and maybe we'll get lucky" -- and how long before the technology progresses to the point that they can come back and say "hey, we see from phone records you called this alleged drug dealer 5 years ago, so we'll be charging you".
If this isn't about as Orwellian as you can get, I don't know what would be. Give up all your freedoms so we can make sure you keep your freedom is a joke -- Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace.
America is quickly ceasing to be free. And I'm pretty sure this doesn't pass Constitutional muster -- everything nowadays is driven by "we have an opinion which says this is ok, so we're going to do it".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We, the voters have a choice. Either start supporting ONLY politicians who fight back against this suppression of our Constitutional rights, or our Republic is doomed.
Today is the 64th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's 1984. Support candidates who fight that suppression. Rand Paul is looking really good for 2016.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
If our government believes throwing out the Constitution is what it takes to protect our nation from terrorist threats, I'm less scared of the terrorists than I am of the government.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
In this case, the "critical tools" are Obama, Eric Holder, or who-ever is behind this large-scale invasion of privacy. I know plenty of people (mostly liberals) complained when the warrant-less wiretaps happened under Bush. It appears that these are considerably larger in scope.
I've heard people say repeatedly that complaints about privacy make little sense in the age of Facebook. After all, the line goes, when people willingly share so much about themselves on the internet why should the government requesting phone logs matter? You've nothing to hide, do you? At least, nothing you've not already shared on Facebook.
I've never joined Facebook because I find the whole system rather intrusive. But these days, being on FB is so expected that you can't even arrange an office party without having to confirm on FB. At some point it becomes a great inconvenience not being on FB. If I didn't dislike the hassle of FB (or its corporate) I might now even be willing to entertain the opposite of the above argument: When the government so regularly spies on all of your activities, no matter how private you might deem them, why should joining Facebook matter?
Because frankly, it isn't paranoia.
Assume all communications are open to government, and corporate, snooping unless you're whispering in someone's ear, and pssst... between you and me, I don't trust you.
The ultimate goal of any police state is merely to justify more spending and expand the business of government. Power and control are merely the stepping stones to riches, not a goal in itself. Many people have trouble accepting this, because they focus on the injustice and assume that injustice is the goal. Or they focus on the power and control and assume that power and control are the goals. Or they focus on the failures and assume that the "intentions" are correct but the "implementation" is wrong.
On the contrary, intentions are the smokescreen, power is the stepping stone, injustice is the "collaterage damage", and money is the goal.
Metadata isn't data - it's data about your data. So it's not really subject to protection, because it's not what you're doing, it's information about what you're doing. It's not an illegal search, because we just want to know about what you're doing, not what you're actually doing. OK?
It's not like we're listening in on your calls, we're just watching to whom and when you call. I mean, it's not like we're doing a database join to find out who's on the other end of the call. That would be an invasion of your privacy. It's just their phone number, IMEI, network identifier, and the start/end geopoints. That's OK. I mean if your parents were at home they could see your phone bill and see who you called too. So we're like your parents that way. We would't give that data to another agency either. Well, unless they asked for it. But they probably won't do that.
So you see, you really have nothing to worry about. It's not a violation of your rights, it's a strengthening of your rights. Because like other government agencies, we only have your best interests at heart. Well other agencies that aren't the IRS. But you know what I mean.
they joined the Verizon Share Everything plan.
This large scale surveillance bullshit has been so useful against terrorism that nothing happened in Boston.
They've built something which is demonstrably (unable || unwilling) to do its job.
Whatever they say its job is.
And now the Obama administration has defended the practice as a "critical tool."
I might be willing to believe that if they would explain what they are doing and why and do so like we are all adults. Instead we get nonsense like the TSA claiming that someone is somehow going to blow up a plane with 4oz of liquid but it would be too dangerous to actually explain and details of this improbable threat to our safety. Frankly I just don't find their explanations (when they bother to provide them) satisfactory and so I'm forced to conclude that they are not acting in manner consistent with appropriate respect for my civil rights.
If there is a genuine threat out there I expect our government to explain what they are doing and why in terms that a reasonable adult can understand. I'm willing to extend some amount of trust to our elected leaders but that trust has very sharp limits and is contingent on continued evidence that they are behaving in a rational and respectful manner. I've seen rather little of that in recent days.
Finally, the truth wins out. All of us "gun lovers" have been trying to tell everyone that Dianne Feinstein is anti-freedom, anti-civil-rights, ant-privacy, and anti-American.
Of course they're bored stiff. That's not the point. My boring life is my own. I'm no man's slave; no man's property. Yet with so much surveillance over people, control becomes possible. We become an increasingly servile state as we become a police and surveillance state. Not because we're necessarily doing anything wrong, but precisely because we are watched. The whole world becomes Foucault's panopticon.
"You've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems," Obama said. "You should reject these voices. Because what these suggest is that somehow our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule is just a sham with which we can't be trusted."
Got Code?
Some news sources have speculated that this program was related to the Boston Marathon Bombing. However The Washington Post sys that
... the order appears to be a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006. The expert, who spoke on the condition
of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said that the order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency.
This particular order was classified as Top Secret/NoForn/SI. The routine nature of the order was likewise highly classified.
Ordinary people-- those not initiated into the orders of nobility associated with "clearances"-- cannot select their government based on real, verifiable information. They have no means to judge the effectiveness, or lack of effectiveness of their political candidates. Instead, they must have faith that their government is either incompetent, or competent.
Do you believe that your government is doing its best to protect you? Surely its effectiveness would be diminished if carefully guarded secrets like this got out, and were use by enemies of the nation and of the state?
Do you believe that the government is doing its best to cynically exploit the security apparatus for its own political benefit? Surely this is but the tip of the iceberg. Were it not for classification, the entire enterprise would be exposed as a cesspool of corruption and criminality.
But in the absence of good solid, reliable data, both of these viewpoints can be freely adopted by any voter who chooses to have an opinion on the matter. Instead of a mass of peoples carefully using their judgements to select the good leaders over the bad, the entire electorate, kept in ignorance, has been reduced to flipping coins.
Government, it seems, is to important to be left to the governed.
I would like to ask that before anybody goes off on a pseudo-rage rant about this.... Take just a second and read about what must be done in order to use FISA data in a criminal prosecution of a US citizen.
Not that this whole situation is trivial... It's just not really as bad as some FUD mongers are making it out to be.
Ok FUD is dead. It's been so overused that it has no meaning - meaning, FUD is used as an implicit ad hominem now. OK?
Also,
Take just a second and read about what must be done in order to use FISA data in a criminal prosecution of a US citizen
Like what?!?
We have seen over the last few years the SCOTUS back up the cops just about every time. Ask me when they didn't, and I'd be hard pressed to find an example. For cases of where they OKay'd what the cops did just requires hitting the Slashdot "older" articles button at the bottom there.
We need to get into out heads that we need - MUST- question authority EVERY time and hold their feet to the fire.
Ask them WHY are you doing what you are doing and JUSTIFY IT.
Blanket statements of "War on Drugs" or War on Terrorism" or "THink of the Children" CANNOT and MUST NOT be an excuse.
Speaking as someone who voted for Obama - I am PISSED!
And to head off the "YOu should have voted for Romney" guys - Fuck you! It would be more of the same times 911. I was HOPING that the BLACK dude would stick to the MAN but he IS the MAN.
I'm a progressive. Not in the rebranded liberal sense, but in the T. Roosevelt, get your government and big business out of my business or I'll kick your ass sense. I don't oppose Obama because I'm a reflexive Tea Party guy who ridiculously, famously, calls him a muslim and radical Christian, socialist and fascist, at the same time.
But the US government is beyond out of control. Elections don't matter. Courts don't matter. The press is as much the problem, as the problem itself. Every peaceful avenue for reform and redress has been shut off or co-opted. Meanwhile, the thieving classes, meaning the 1%, are doubling down on their behavior thinking that no one in the 99% will ever hold them to account.
That means the clock is ticking for an American Spring. We are not hapless, disarmed Libyans. We are heavily armed Americans who have been raised from birth to believe we have a God-given right to be free. Those in the army are our brothers, sisters, and cousins. They are us. So if the 1% truly believe that they'll simply follow orders and drop napalm on the neighborhoods where their friends and family live, then they are due for an extremely rude awakening.
Go ahead, 1%'ers, move all your wealth to the British Virgin Islands and secrete yourselves there. Much good it will do you. Justice is coming, it's coming very soon, and you have a giant target painted on your ass.
YMMV
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
What if it IS a critical tool? Huh? What if it's a fact about the world that this is a critical tool and is being used in the way it should to be used?
Is that possibility so counter to known reality that it should just be rejected out of hand the way you-all are doing ?
Because most readers here are acting on the premise that it's a true fact about the world that it is NOT a critical tool.
How did you acquire that certain knowledge about a set of facts in the world that you have no special knowledge of- the information contained in the President's PDBs?
I don't think it's unrealistic to the world as I understand it. Even if today, it is strictly not necessary because , say, we are overestimating the capabilities terrorists, what about tomorrow?
Nano-technology and artificial biology and genetic manipulation and high tech fabbing will come down to something close to the personal level sooner or later.
Civil secular society doesn't WANT to use those things to cause mass casualties to civilians and destablize the modern world, but sooner or later the steady increase of destructive power and the steady decrease in the number of people and resources it takes to wield that destructive power will intersect at an unfortunate point and it will be wielded by Christian or Islamic religionists who place no value on the affairs of men but only live to fight an unseen war taking place on some cosmic plane.
Then what?
Be truly rational and entertain the notion in your mind as a hypothesis that there is now or will be shortly something about the world that makes this measure necessary to countering acts of mass terrorism. . Now. What SHOULD we do?
We should have a national, open thorough, skeptical, informed and honest discussion across a wide range of topics around the security / privacy / liberty triad work out , aloud publicly and together what tradeoffs we're willing to endure and what ones we're not. What level of destruction and death and societal disruption we're collectively willing to endure and when - and if - that level ever becomes unacceptable.
We need to talk about this consciously and on a national scale. We need to talk as a nation and be explicit and be formal and capture as well as we can what we'll do and not do BEFORE anything happens.
Because what we have now is a strictly reactionary populace and to a degree government, who decides what the privacy liberty / security triad is going to look like right after and in response to terrorist events.
The result is anything but solidarity and unity. The Government hides its actions from the People. The People don't trust their Government and impugn ulterior - nearly insane - motives and this is as true on the left as it is on the right.
We are failing this national imperative. We are failing to plan and harden civil society for an inevitable war. We are at once protected, coddled and violated by our national security apparatus because it - and we - think we can't handle the truth.
I would love to think America would lead here, but America rarely leads. It's what Churchill said America will always do the right thing after every other possibility has been exhausted.
I think it has to be the EU that leads here. They are much more rational , less fanatically religious and absolutist in their world view , and inclined more towards collective action than the US.
Someone somewhere has to start talking about this and someone in government needs to give that discussion the imprimatur of officialdom and lift it up. We have to do this because the alternative is structural, institutionalized extremism, borne in reaction to random events, fueled by reactionary impulses and finally codified into law.
That is when civil society stats to break down, not because of a bomb or disease or anything else but because we permitted ourselves to continue exist in a fantasy land of 18th century perspectives and values until that fantasy was exploded and we had no idea how to carry on.
So in actuality, they aren't "watching" at all.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
"Because we have no fucking intent to ever change our corporate-foreign-military policy of fucking with everyone in their own backyards."
I have all but stopped posting online and know without doubt that I am potentially being monitored at every opportunity, every transaction, every stoplight, fly over cameras.. ad nauseam. This is not new or news.
What should be gained from this "story" is not the shoveling of data to the government. what you should ask yourself when you hear a blatant and obvious illegal and unconstitutional usurpation of rights is... why am I hearing this.
Think about that for a bit and then realize what this "story" is about.
For those who cant or wont make the logical leaps.. let me spell it out.
This information is not some news scoop. If you dont think the US govt and mass media outlets can and do make information (and people for that matter) disappear then I envy your bliss.
No, when you see these headlines, what you are seeing is a focused and intentional psychological exercise to let you know how it will be, not some lucky journalist who got the next big story. Look at it for what it is.. not what it is intended to do.
This has been going on at least since 2005 and its more than just phone call records - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
"Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before SBC purchased AT&T.[1] The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic[3] and, as analyzed by J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore "the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic. Former director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been installed throughout the United States.[2]"
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
I guess there is good reason to build this in Utah. Once they start collecting the content and not just the databases...all that data must go somewhere.
The GP was indicating an implicit inferrence that these things would be illegal in a hypothetical future. I cannot say as I don't believe that criminality will be broadened in the coming years, evidenced by the expansion of laws in the previous years. A future where it's illegal to have contact with anyone who is considered a criminal or enemy of the state does not seem that far fetched, and with total surveillance, it makes it easier.
"I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i believe the puppet on the right has My interests at heart...hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!"..Bill Hicks.
Can we PLEASE just accept that the whole "left versus right" thing is nothing but kayfabe to give the sheep the illusion of choice? I mean why do you think Obama kept ALL the crap about Bush that the left hated? because its the same corporate masters behind the curtain pulling the strings, he was told to STFU and read the cue cards and play his part. Ventura said being a politician was no different than wrestling, you pretend to hate the guy while the camera rolls and when it stops you have lunch together. Why do you think Goldman Sachs has stayed in control of the fed no matter if there is a D or R in the white house? Why do you think the press drums up and pushes the hell out of "issues' like gay rights when most don't give a fat fuck about that either way? because these things the corps don't give a fat fuck about either, so no matter what the population chooses it won't affect them.
So can we PLEASE finally end the lie that voting is gonna do jack shit in a two party system? Obama kept every bit of the jack booted bullshit dubya started and then some, and no matter whom you "choose" (which is in and of itself a scam, look up "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" to see how many hoops the press went through just to make sure that Paul had no chance during the primary, or the behind the scenes video Alex Jones got of the RNC where the outcome of the voice vote shows up on the prompter BEFORE the vote was called) all you are gonna get is coke in a can versus coke in a bottle, only pre-approved corporate shills need apply.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"Bored stiff" + "entertainment using the resources at hand". Heh.
suicide bombings and truck bombings by terrorists
Don't discount the possibility of such events being staged in the form of false-flag ops in order to justify an Orwellian surveillance society. Do you honestly think that a government which inoculated blankets with smallpox and withheld medical treatment from syphilis patients is above killing a few fellow Americans all in the name of consolidating power? Don't be so fucking naive.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
The Democratic Party passes the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare
Oh, and another thing. The ACA is based on model legislation authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank. Whilst there are member of both parties who are ideological outliers (e.g., Alan Grayson and Russ Feingold when he was in office on the left, and some of the Teabaggers on the right), the bases of both parties are overwhelmingly similar. Hence the colloquialisms 'Demopub' and 'Republicrat'. To quote Chomsky: 'The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.'
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman