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Senator Dianne Feinstein: NSA Metadata Program Here To Stay
cold fjord writes "The Hill reports, 'Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) predicted Sunday that lawmakers who favored shutting down the bulk collection of telephone metadata would not be successful in their efforts as Congress weighs potential reforms to the nation's controversial intelligence programs. "I don't believe so," Feinstein said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press (video). "The president has very clearly said that he wants to keep the capability So I think we would agree with him. I know a dominant majority of the — everybody, virtually, except two or three, on the Senate Intelligence Committee would agree with that." ... "A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan. New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness," Feinstein said. "We need to be prepared. I think we need to do it in a way that respects people's privacy rights."'"
will never go away citizen, we need to spy on you to keep you safe. Now pick up that can.
Anyone that thinks this wouldn't stay around in some form isn't dealing with reality. It's far to useful to someone somewhere.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Seriously, what federal government program has ever been rolled back?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan."
On the contrary, I think they understand that very well.
It would do my heart good if she moved to another state so we can get back to business as usual around here....
I'm not sure any state would want her
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"A matter of [internal] security... the age old cry of the oppressor!" - Captain Picard
"We" are not the Great Satan, Dianne. That would be you and the rest of your despicable brood of self-righteous overbearing pax americana terrorists.
Is this woman for real? She seems very protective of our Great Satan role. There are new vicious terrorists popping up everywhere, especially right here in our own back yard she seems to infer... And what the hell, the president thinks it's a good idea, so those of us in the congressional branch ought to jump right behind him on that, because, you know, he's a politician, we're politicians and we all just roll like that... Everyone knows that the American people don't need/want privacy anyhow... They will all feel so much better once we remove those annoying constitutional freedoms that are such a distraction in their day to day lives. Just like castrating a dog! How does that silly putz stay in office anyhow?
"A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan."
Maybe we shouldn't occupy that role?
Good thing that the Legislative and Executive branches of government are set up to balance each other.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If she says the metadata program needs to stay, then she needs to go. It's as simple as that.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
What she is really saying is, "Fuck you Citizen! We are the Government and will do as we like. We are not concerned that nearly all Americans and 100% of foreign nationals are appalled by our actions. Go back to playing with your iPhones while us grownups take care of business".
No,no, no! You pillage BEFORE you burn!
Amazing the number of people who get that wrong and do them out of order....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Indeed, there is a very dangerous terrorist on the loose: her name is Dianne Feinstein.
Circumcision is child abuse.
What do they have on her?
A husband that makes a fortune through her legislation and owns companies which profit from defense contracts?
They don't need anything on her.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
"A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan..."
The senate intelligence committee behaves as if we've already lost our national identity to the "war on terror." Surely Feinstein understands that "privacy people" aren't going to be placated by such a statement and that their continuing discontent will only serve to perpetuate the perception of our formerly great nation as "the Great Satan." It's a vicious circle, and the only way out is to enact policies that live up to the two key tenets outlined in the last line of our national anthem.
As an aside, I don't think there's anyone left in this country who doesn't understand that we occupy the role of "the Great Satan." Republican constituents meet the idea with doggedly obstinate belligerence. Democratic constituents snivel the truism to comfort themselves while their two-faced ideologues advance the security state agenda after being elected to do the opposite. We all see it.
She's not crazy, she's evil.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Feinstein's falling victim to what I like to call "The Information Fallacy." Let's say that we knew that terrorists were going to blow something up at some time. It would be hard to thwart this based on this information, right? But if we obtained more information and learned their names, their target, and the exact date they planned to attack, thwarting them gets a lot easier. So far so good, but it can lead people to figure that getting even more information would lead to finding even more terrorist plots (perhaps even ones we don't know about yet).
In an ideal world, albeit one where privacy isn't a concern, this might be true. In the real world, though, gathering tons of information from everyone just leads to a signal-to-noise problem. For every one "Let's blow this up" terrorist phone record there will be millions (if not more) of "How's dad doing?", "When should we meet for dinner?", and other mundane phone records. There might even be some that tick off the right keyword boxes but for the wrong reasons. "That backpack is da bomb" might refer to explosives in a carry-on or it might be the use of slang to indicate that the person's backpack is really nice.
Sadly, too many politicians are worried that reducing the information we gather is just going to let terrorist messages slip by. It might, but we should be doing more focused information gathering (with proper checks and balances to prevent abuse) to improve signal-to-noise, not general information gathering hoping that some signal pokes out from all of the surrounding noise.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness," Feinstein said. "We need to be prepared."
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
We keep hearing about the boogeyman terrorists who are coming for us .. these terrible people with these terrible plans. But really, we've done orders of magnitude more damage to ourselves than anyone external possibly could have done. And we continue to bludgeon ourselves about the head and shoulders, deflecting any semblance of reasoning with "because terrorism"
This signature is false.
Never mind that none of these programs have stopped any attack or plot.
That you know of. And, for the record, I'm not a fan of collecting against citizens w/o a warrant.
I am certain that should one of those programs (NSA or TSA) ever stop a terrorist plot, even by accident, such success would be trumpeted for years to come. The vague and general references to hundreds of terrorist plots is an indication that there is nothing real to talk about.
the debate is about WHEN and HOW...the government has the right to access your personal data with proper warrant
what is proper warrant for the different kinds of digital communication?
THATS THE QUESTION that none of the privacy trolls here on slashdot want to discuss.
I think the issue is rather that the anti-privacy advocates do everything in their power to avoid that question, since the answer is pretty cut-and-dried - warrants shall be issued describing the particular place to be searched, and the particular thin to be seized, pursuant to Amendment IV of the United States Constitution.
Don't like it? Amend the Constitution, or deal with it and operate within existing law. Feigned ignorance is no excuse.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
So which is it? Is our police state so incomptent that it can't stop disturbed teens from shooting up schools, or are the terrorists so incompetent that they can't manage similar (or worse) carnage? And other than 9/11, it's not like we were swimming in attacks before they went all Stasi on us.
The Constitution is the law here, and the only criminals we need to be focused on are the ones in our own government. They gave away the freedoms that Al Qaeda could never take from us and that makes them worse in my book.
With those two exceptions California is actually largely Republican.
Right. That's why California has 38 Democrats versus 15 Republicans in the House of Representatives, 2 Democrat senators, over 60% of the voters vote Democrat in presidential elections and the Republicans haven't won a majority of the popular vote in presidential elections since 1988. (that's 25 years for those of you counting at home) The Democrats hold enormous majorities in the State House and State Senate and registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by over 2.5 million voters.
But you go ahead and keep believing that California is "largely Republican" if it helps you sleep at night.
Elections are rigged....that should be obvious after the California GMO labeling vote where the results were polled as 70% in favor of, and then amazingly and unexpectedly the actual vote tally was reversed with 70% voting against the labeling.
That was when I knew that Californians DO NOT VOTE.
Why?
Because you have a reversal of the poll, on a indifference based issue. What does that mean? Most people either care about having GMO products labeled or they do not give a damn. Almost no percentage of the population except for a few die hard folks on the right that still 3 DDT are actually concerned about preventing GMO labeling.
So you had grass roots vs the weeds of indifference. With zero affect on the weeds. Those who don't care about GMO labelling, have not horse in the race. Adding it doesn't affect them. They don't care. That was an IMPOSSIBLE vote, blamed on a spending and advertising fee but clearly a result of the electronic voting fabrication system.
I've always been generally right-leaning, and I am REALLY up in arms about the NSA stuff.
It's not really a left/right issue. It's an issue of how you feel about the 4th amendment and how much you trust the government to protect your civil liberties. I don't have any ideological objection to the government being empowered to look for dangerous criminals but I have a HUGE problem with them gutting my Constitutional rights in pursuit of these same criminals. It's NOT SUPPOSED to be convenient for the government to watch me. That is the entire point of the 4th amendment and a few others as well. Terrorists are criminals and I expect them to be treated as such under the law, particularly when the party under suspicion is a US citizen.
I think the problem is that circumstances have organized such that the executive branch no longer has meaningful oversight. Congress is unwilling to take a stand because anyone who does gets voted out of office for "being soft on terrorism". The judiciary has largely punted on the issue so far by claiming no one has standing to challenge. (It's unclear how you prove standing against a classified program that you can go to jail for talking about) Worst of all we have a surveillance program with zero accountability to the electorate. We have a secret program, doing secret activities, "overseen" by a secret (rubber stamp) court, with secret findings than are never required to be made public. Exactly how am I as a citizen supposed to make an informed evaluation of the actions of the NSA? Maybe what they are doing is fine (yeah I doubt it too) but I have no way to know.