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Senators Push To Preserve NSA Phone Surveillance
cold fjord writes "The New York times reports that the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Vice Chairman, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), are moving a bill forward that would 'change but preserve' the controversial NSA phone log program. Senator Feinstein believes the program is legal, but wants to improve public confidence. The bill would reduce the time the logs could be kept, require public reports on how often it is used, and require FISA court review of the numbers searched. The bill would require Senate confirmation of the NSA director. It would also give the NSA a one week grace period in applying for permission from a court to continue surveillance of someone that travels from overseas to the United States. The situation created by someone traveling from overseas to the United States has been the source of the largest number of incidents in the US in which NSA's surveillance rules were not properly complied with. The rival bill offered by Senators Wyden (D-OR) and Udall (D-CO) which imposes tougher restrictions is considered less likely to pass."
They're not representing the people and therefore undemocratic. Fire them.
As a world traveler who is actively seeing many places, cultures and things let me tell you about my perspective... Nah, I better keep my mouth shut.
Also who trusts FISA again??? The secret court that declares itself legal... I think I did that in the garage when I was 5.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Would someone fucking put Feinstein out of my misery already.
Why do so few people understand that? The surveillance in totalitarian regimes is typically "legal", something being "legal" does not mean anything.
You can in fact establish a totalitarian regime in an entirely legal way almost everywhere. Step one is to scare the population into irrationality ("terrorism" and other specters work nicely). Then you manipulate the supreme court (if you have one) into doing more and more bizarre interpretations of the constitution (if you have one). This has been going on for some while in the US. And finally you drop all pretense and make laws against "crimes" that place more and more people into that class (victim-less crimes work well here), so you can get rid easily of anybody you do not like. Allowing the use of random finds in searches, even when the original reason for the search turns out to be bogus (a truly despicable practice) helps, because everybody has something illegal that can be found with over-broad criminalization. Then scare the targets into a deal, so no judge or jury gets to examine the accusations.
See, easy. And well under way in the US.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
America has a horrible habit of not learning from history. It is worrying to see obvious extremists like Feinstein, pushing through viciously totalitarian legislation of this type.
Look at the German experience of these type of laws - first with the Nazis, then with the Stasi police state.
What has been happening in America is FAR more reaching than either the Nazi or Stasi surveillance ever was. The American people need to act now, to move towards a democratic path. It will be a difficult journey after such a long period of ruthless totalitarian government. It will require rebuilding of all the fundemental institutions of the state, to be free of corruption, and to be free of corporate interference. I hope for the sake of ordinary americans, that they can cast aside the corrupt regime, before it is too late, and their country implodes.
If there is any hope, it lies in the proles.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Absolutely right and on topic. "Legal" became very fashionable word for various organized crime rings within governments around the world.
"The law" turned into another business venue which can be stretched to some shady organization or group of people liking. Add media ownership to that mix and any passages from the Constitution are not worth more than toilet paper.
Crypto-anarchism.
Victory through mathematics!
The bill would reduce the time the logs could be kept, require public reports on how often it is used, and require FISA court review of the numbers searched.
Riiiight. The organization that lied to Congress, lied to the FISA Kangaroo Court, and then lied to the public when they got caught is going to suddenly be cowed by tweaking the law.
They should call this the Whitewash Amendment.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Given that their behaviour is grossly inconsistent with their other political views, one is forced to the conclusion that the NSA has got some means of coercion to get them to propose this.
It's too convenient an escape hatch for anything the government wants to sweep under the rug.
"Let's say we did something so that we can start pretending things are different."
The bill would require Senate confirmation of the NSA director.
So this Senator's solution to "reform" is to give more power to herself and that respected, august body of dispassionate reason and good judgement, the Senate.
Yet she has no problem with the FISA rubberstampers being the final overseer.
Why am I surprised?
I voted for Feinstein many times, but you know what? She needs to go. She needs to lose her job because she's nothing but an ossified and unoriginal thinker in times which call for a radical re-thinking of the relationship between privacy, security and liberty.
She's 80 years old and she doesn't "get" the modern world anymore. The times she';s legislating for are now officially over and the post 9-11, post apocalyptic global terrorism, post-Snowden times are what we have now have to sort out. She's doddering around commanding her staffers to tweak things here and there and move a few chairs around .
She is part of the go-along-to-get-along business as usual crows that has failed us and brought us to this point. Time to go. Enjoy your gold-plated Senate healthcare retirement benefits.
Yeah, because the two vastly Democrat urban areas in California are going to vote Republican to toss a senator. I wish you were correct, but right now people vote for the brand, and not the policy.
And the Republican brand is only slightly better than Enron in California.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Every nation gets the government it deserves.
A government program that feels its duty is to review the contents of every American email, phone call, and SMS, regardless of such superficial things like 'warrants'? You own it, Americans. After decades of inviting the federal government to fix your problems, this is what you get. From the Midwest corn farmers enjoying their subsidies to the inner city food-stamp-reared-baby-machines, Americans have sold themselves for pennies on their liberty. Worse, you don't even get a good deal with your Faustian compromises. You awarded yourselves a universal healthcare program that is neither universal nor financially sound. Your social security program seizes your salary and barely beats inflation on returns (if you even get it back).
This is what you get. You've handed so much of your agency to your political class, they can't help but think they can make the best decisions for you. Perhaps that's why the wealthiest counties in America ring the capital. Perhaps that's why your representatives make 300% per capita GDP in salary and have an average net worth nearly 30x the average American family's. Perhaps that's why they see fit to exempt themselves from the laws they write.
You've fed the megalomaniacs. Good luck telling them you want your 'privacy' back.
Ooo Fables! Some of these are pretty topical:
The Trees and the Axe
A Man came into a forest, and made a petition to the Trees to provide him a handle for his axe. The Trees consented to his request, and gave him a young ash-tree. No sooner had the man fitted from it a new handle to his axe, than he began to use it, and quickly felled with his strokes the noblest giants of the forest. An old oak, lamenting when too late the destruction of his companions, said to a neighboring cedar: "The first step has lost us all. If we had not given up the rights of the ash, we might yet have retained our own privileges and have stood for ages."
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Senator Feinstein believes the program is legal, but wants to improve public confidence.
That made me chuckle. Sorry Senator, once you've been caught hiding things people are going to think you are still hiding things even if you're not. That's how the loss of trust works. You see, we don't trust you or the NSA anymore. As a wise man once said, fool me once shame on you, fool me can't get fooled again. So there will be no improvement of confidence amongst thinking people. The NSA spies on us and lied about it. It will take a long time of explicit good behavior for us to trust you or NSA again. And we all know that's not going to happen.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I don't think we can put the surveillance genie back in the bottle, and I fully understand why anyone involved in national defense would want to keep things just as they are.
My primary concern is the lack of oversight. Or rather, the lack of *proof* of oversight. They could have the best oversight in the world and it wouldn't matter if it were all performed by secret courts.
I'd be satisfied if they'd simply let people know when their records were being viewed for any reason, with a reasonable delay for ongoing investigations. 3 years from now a bunch of people would get letters saying "We intercepted your email on Date XX with respect to investigation YY". And those letters would be our raw data for determining how out of control the NSA may or may not be.
Feel free to pick apart the idea, but the core point is that these guys are backed by a ton of money and power. Their only restraints are legal/procedural. There is very little physically restraining them from vacuuming up all the data in the world and using it as they see fit. The most important thing we can do is provide a feedback mechanism from the rest of society so we can detect and correct when they've crossed a line.
Last post!
Now that we're telling stories, there's this fragment of Terry Pratchett I've been wanting to share about this whole debâcle:
...'
... a fine man!' the Chamberlain gibbered. 'I won't say a word against Lord Hong! I certainly don't believe it's true that he has spies everywhere! Long life to Lord Hong, that's what I say!'
... Lord Hong!'
Terry Pratchett - Interesting Times (p. 243)
'Poison,' said Cohen. 'I hate poisoners. Just about the worst sort, poisoners. Creeping around, putting muck in a man's grub
He glared at the Chamberlain.
'Was it you?' He looked at Rincewind and jerked a thumb towards the cowering Chamberlain. 'Was it him? Because if it was he's going to get done to him what I did to the mad Snake Priests of Start, and this time I'll use both thumbs!'
'No,' said Rincewind. 'It was someone they called Lord Hong. But they all watched him do it.'
A little scream erupted from the Lord Chamberlain. He threw himself to the floor and was about to kiss Cohen's foot until he realized that this would have about the same effect as eating the pork.
'Mercy, o celestial being! We are all pawns in the hands of Lord Hong!'
'What's so special about Lord Hong, then?'
'He's
He risked looking up and found the point of Cohen's sword just in front of his eyes.
'Yeah, but right now who're you more frightened of? Me or this Lord Hong?'
'Uh
Cohen raised an eyebrow. 'I'm impressed. Spies everywhere, eh?'
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Yes, because there are only two political parties in California, the Democrats and the Republicans.
<rant>
Oh wait.. maybe that's actually true. I'm not American so I wouldn't know.
But from an outsider perspective, the fact that your Political Party of Power has more than 90% of the vote (about equally split between the slightly-more-right PPP-Republian wing and the slightly-more-left PPP-Democrat wing), is in fact your largest problem. You need a political party that promises just *ONE* thing: to reform elections to representative democracy; effective multi-party system, like all? non-Anglo-Saxon democracies have.
After that one change, it will at least become possible that other voices are heard in parliament. Because if your Democrats and Republicans are so bad, then the normal situation would be that less than half of your electorate would vote for them, not 95% as it is now. (I made that number 95% up BTW). The mechanisms of power wheeling-and-dealing change, when the voice of the people is occasionally heard in parliament.
</rant>
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
It DOES reflect the majority of voters. The majority voted for Feinstein and all the rest. I've spoken to several people who think the NSA thing isn't a problem. They grow more concerned when I provide them some information about what the NSA has been doing.
It's not that the majority wants to be spied on, it's that the majority is watching Dancing With the Stars. In some surveys, most people didn't know who the vice president was. Of those who DID know the vice president's name, around 40% say they get their news from Comedy Central.
So about 15% of Americans read or watch news programs (South Park and Daily Show aren't news).
The majority doesn't know what NSA stands for, and the nature of that majority is reflected in the government's actions.