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Officials Say NSA Probed Fewer Than 300 Numbers - Broke Plots In 20 Nations
cold fjord writes "Yet more details about the controversy engulfing the NSA. From CNET: 'Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, explained how the program worked without violating individuals' civil rights. "We take the business records by a court order, and it's just phone numbers — no names, no addresses — put it in a lock box," Rogers told CBS News' "Face The Nation." "And if they get a foreign terrorist overseas that's dialing in to the United Sates, they take that phone number... they plug it into this big pile, if you will, of just phone numbers — it's like a phonebook without any names and any addresses with it — to see if there's a connection, a foreign terrorist connection to the United States." "When a number comes out of that lock box, it's just a phone number — no names, no addresses," he said. "If they think that's relevant to their counterterrorism investigation, they give that to the FBI. Then upon the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is."' From the AP: ' ... programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries — and that gathered data is destroyed every five years. Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records ... the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programs are far less sweeping than their detractors allege.... both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under the program, the records, showing things like time and length of call, can only be examined for suspected connections to terrorism, they said. The ... program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways.'"
The point is not what the NSA has done with the information. The point is what they could do. Having "legally" (I use the term advisedly) obtained all this information on every American, they could now use it for any nefarious purpose. Having done so in secret, they hardly seem trustworthy.
I'm old enough to remember the days when we posted garbage at the end of messages for the "NSA line eater." Time to do that again.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
This. This is exactly how I almost turned my ultra-conservative, war-hawk, get-the-terrorists-at-any-price to stop defending the program. I just simply said, "what if the democrats had a full-blown, no-secret, Muslim run for president on the idea of diversity and part of their platform is that they would implement Sharia?"
"Well, no raghead would ever get elected."
"His Muslim friends will make cheap oil available and they will run on taxing the rich so that more people get handouts from the government. I mean, democrats already got 47%; how much harder would an additional 4% be with that?"
"Well, we'd rise up against the flagrant violations of the Constitution."
"And now, the administration calls you terrorists and starts monitoring who you call because someone else called you under the same guilt by association theory. And that is what they admit they do, they'd probably bug your phone too."
(dead silence, sound of rusty gears starting to turn again in his head) "Yeah.... They've gone too far. We've got to stop OBAMA. "
(I sigh because I got so close.)
An interesting note to that conversation is how much of that just went unchallenged because Fox News has convinced him that it is actually possible.