If Congressw did that then why are they now upset at the excesses?
They're not, that's the whole point. Some of them are squeezing this for momentary political advantage. Period. You'll notice that the key figures in both houses are not calling for a stop to the programs they were briefed on. They think the program should continue, because even they find it valuable... they just want to be able to at the same time try to find a way to score against their political opponents while talking about the program's origins.
Secret prisons
Well, not any more, unfortunately, because of leaks. We have important new allies in eastern Europe. Some of them are very anxious to help tamp down Islamic extremism, living as they do so close to it. Those countries (like Poland, or Romania) are very supportive, but have limited resources at this point. Providing geographically closer places to set aside, question, and house people snagged during overease raids on the organizations funding and operating terrorists in dozens of countries... very valuable. Mostly because the people those people were working with don't know where their co-conspirators are, or whether (like KSM) they'd given up tons of priceless information about how cells work, communicate, etc.
imprisonment without trial
Detention, you mean? As in, taking a combatant out of the area in which he's been blowing people up, shooting at cargo trucks, funneling cash to people that chop the heads off of journalists, that sort of thing? Exactly which local US criminal laws would you use against someone who is caught with a truckload of weapons, having just planted an IED along side a convoy route in Afghanistan? Under normal military circumstances, that person would be prisoner of war, and would be held without any trial or possibility of release until the conflict is over... though if that person could be found ot have been deliberately targeting civilians, etc., they might be tried on war crimes. Except... these guys are not in uniform, don't answer to governmental chain of command, and are also not always citizens of the countries in which they're killing people (or supporting those that do). So: you'd rather let them go right back to what they're doing? Or would you rather take them out of action while we do everything we can to dismantle the operation they're working with, and make their purpose (say, stopping democracy from taking hold in Iraq or returning the Taliban to power in Afghanistan) a lost cause?
all clearly illegal (and NOT authorized by the USA Patriot Act)
The PATRIOT act relates to dropping counterproductive barriers between intelligence agencies so that they can actually get some work done. That's completely separate from the other acts and funding passed through congress that expressly empowered the president to work within the framework of a war footing, even though we're dealing with a type of conflict and threat with which no previous administration has had to contend. Well, Clinton had to contend with it, he just didn't really do anything about it that mattered. Dead embassy workers and civilians across Africa, dead sailors on the Cole... those things weren't enough to gin up the required support in Congress at the time, apparently... or he didn't seem to be suggesting he was willing and able to actually press the Taliban, etc., in a permanent, irreversible way. So, after 9/11 there's enough of a sense of urgency to do something about it, and authority's granted to the correct branch of government to act. Meanwhile, the senior reps get regular briefings and have to regularly approve funding for all it. Does that mean that we shouldn't worry when some complete twit out of his element and running guard details at a prison in Iraq decides to be a jackass and take pictures of humiliated prisoners? No. Off to jail with him, actually. Does that mean we have to be extra special nice, and treat Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a key 9/11 organizer, like a cushy white collar criminal while convincing him to tell us what he knows? No. Depriving terrorist financiers and bomb-planters of creature comforts is not torture.
Pelosi is never briefed on secret programs since she is not a member of the Intelligence Committees.
Wake up. In October, 2001, Pelosi was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committe. She even wrote to the NSA director following a briefing on these exact programs at that time. If she was so sure that the agency was being directed to do something illegal, her inquiries about it sure weren't phrased that way. And she continued to vote to fund exactly these activities for years following the events that triggered the need. She sat in the room and heard the words "NSA", "telephone records", "database" and all the rest. Perhaps you're suggesting she's too dumb to grasp what was being explained to her? Not the sort of person you want on an intelligence oversight committee, if that's the case.
What kind of oversight is that?
The kind that you, as a congressional representative, vote on. Which she did, and continued to... because even she knows that this area of activity is not just some administration power play, it's the intel agencies' jobs, and leaders of both parties in both the senate and the house were well aware of it, and to this day indicate that they don't want it to stop. Pelosi included. She's just spinning semantics for political traction in other areas.
Great, then screw 'em, all the more so. Of all people, the Israelis should know better than to harbor that sort of trash on their local infrastructure. I have no problem using a little pressure to remind them why they should put a thousandth of the energy they put into tracking down Hamas-financed suburban missle attackers and stamp out the local spam twits. That is, if they want to maintain their image as the primary bastion of democracy, rule of law, and more-or-less sensibility in the middle east.
Bush taking exceptional powers because of the War on Terror is as absurd as it would have been for Johnson to have called himself a wartime President because of the War on Poverty, or Bush Senior for the War on Drugs
It may be a clunky label to use for a wide-ranging conflict with militant islamo-fascists, but that didn't stop Congress from, in the wake of thousands of citizens being killed by an identifiable, repeat-offender group, extending to the executive branch exactly the military/intel options needed (and now being used). If you're going to thump the table while citing history, at least cite all of it.
Actually if this were aimed at a bigger company I'd be surprised if the current US administration didn't want to jump in to protect the business. Of course they'd hype it as a live fire test and play down the business side.
Well, gee, we sure wouldn't want to be seen protecting US businesses from foreign attack. That would be unseemly! After all, they're just made up of US citizens, providing jobs, fueling the stock market and millions of people's family investments. Much better to what... convey the impression that government should leave business targets to fend for themselves in the face of a demonstrable attack from overseas? Acting under such circumstances is easier (than acting in deal with a wave of spam from thousands of bots pointed at thousands of mail servers), it goes farther to signal to everyone involved that the economy as a whole is not a workable target.
Pulling the plug on foreign network access is probably not the solution though... but massive DoS against targets ON those networks sure is. Just stop up their pipes so that they can't interact usefully with their botnets.
Yup, and I'd have loved to have seen the US gov use this as a perfect 'live fire' exercise. After all, if they can't stop a few punk spammers how can we have any confidence they could stop a determined attack by the usual terrorist suspects?
My first reaction is to agree with you, partly just because I'd like to see the full might of our larger teams of spookier cyber-folks brought to bear on the spammers... but I'm thinking that this might be one of those things that would squander the public debut of some of those capabilities. I'd rather that we save such visible displays for when it matters (more). This matters, but perhaps not as much as deliberate attack on larger or more public pieces of the infrastructure.
I don't mind abuses of power or violations of the due process of law, because they're being done by the people I voted for
Nope. I either do - or don't - like what the people I have - or have not - voted for did, do, or will do. Actual actions (or appropriate resistance to action), not "feel your pain" speeches or general hand wringing or feel-good legislation that accomplishes nothing. That applies to both parties.
"It's completely untrue that I am on the side of authority on every issue. I in fact strongly oppose the use of authority against me. I only advocate authority when the authority is being used against people other than me. So this isn't about sides, really."
Even you don't think that's how I think, or you wouldn't have to sound so snide saying it. I'm personally comfortable with the fact that there are objectively reasonable, rational uses for government authority and force and clandestine activity, just as there are objectively clear situations where it's inappropriate. Unless you're going to take the position of the pure there-is-no-right-and-wrong moral relativist, what this comes down to is clarifying what's right and not. So, unless I'm doing something illegal, you're right that I don't think authority should be used "on" me. And unless you're posing a threat, the same applies for you. It's not about me vs. everyone else, it's about what I, and everyone else does.
You're forgetting one thing. The NSA doing domestic spying is illegal. In effect, the government has promised the people that the NSA will not spy on them, and is standing accused of breaking that promise
How can I be forgetting that? It's what we're talking about. What part of "not monitoring domestic calls" are you equating with spying? And if compiling telco call records is what has you worried, why were you not complaining for the last many decades when law enforcement and intel agencies have had all the warrantless access to that info they could ask for? Were you complaining eight years ago when the Clinton administration's Justice Department could and did use the same access to telco records for investigations at the time? Or that your local PD can and does do exactly the same thing every day? I'm not forgetting anything, I'm reminding you.
If you actually support domestic spying without warrants, then that is far more damning than the words I might have put in your mouth.
Actually, what I'm doing is calling BS on the people who only say they don't like something when it's their most-of-the-time political antagonists who happen to be in office. Would I support domestic tapping of my calls without warrant? No. Would I support some fed throwing a dart and looking at my phone records because I happen to have a customer in Turkey? No. Would I be very, very glad if there was a pre-indexed momma of a database that could be mined as needed if an analyst sifting through Al Zarqawi's backpack comes up with a NY telephone number? Yes. It's what you DO with call logs, not whether they're available. They were available, without warrant, before this administration, and they're available now. The difference is the ability to prep those records for the sort of timely research that's called for when you're more worried about what's on a freight container that cleared customs two days ago than you are about large-scale troop movements (and other not-like-they-used-to-be issues).
Mostly, I'm just taking a poke at the people who don't care about whether or not their politicians have heard plenty of briefings that include "domestic calls," "compile database," and "NSA" in the same sentence, but which do care when someone they don't like for other reasons is involved.
"Democrats do horrible things too, so don't complain when we do horrible things. Democrats in Congress voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, so stop blaming us."
You're putting words in my mouth. I think that pre-indexing call logs (always available, warrantlessly, to law enforcement anyway) is a pretty good thing to do, in terms of allowing speedy, on-the-fly follow-up of intel related to fleeting, evasive terrorist types. Mind you, no connection to that sort of intel work makes such poking and prodding into that data by investigators unseemly, and I don't like it.
But you're implying that I think the actions taken to analyze bad-guy-communications in the wake of 9/11 (when it was pretty obvious that there were trails to follow) is across-the-board bad, and that I'm saying, "see, Democrats do bad things too." You're wrong. I'm saying, "see, for once some Democrats get the problem, and what's more, they're actually being a little bit circumspect about how they sling mud relative to what they know has to be done."
That's really not the same as the words you were putting in my mouth.
I don't think you are a troll really though, I think you just happen to be on the side of power and authority on every issue.
Not really. In fact I am completely repulsed by all sorts of government policies, overreaching, and "it takes a village" type nonsense. I can't stand, for example, the current administration's (and that of many members of it's party) take on issues like abortion, stem cell research, etc. It's crazy.
On the side of power? Pay closer attention to the things I say. First, there's context... I'm usually replying to some completely irrational and overwrought expression of hatred for businesses, governments, etc. Some balance is appropriate in a venue like this, even if it's just as a voice in the wilderness. That said, I also dislike certain types of power grabs: I don't like the way certain unions, for example, attempt to leverage what's left of their image to force their members to pretend they all have exactly the same political leanings. I don't like the awesome, nearly unstoppable power of undereducated, non-critical-thinking masses being manipulated by a shallow, callow interchangeable celebrity artistocracy. I don't like exactly the same thing when it comes to organized religion.
Authority? I don't like that which I can't vote out of existence. I'm not talking as much about individual people in one office or the next, but about social programs and other entitlements that tend to get an undue amount of intertia and are almost impervious to change. Organizations like the military or the intelligence agencies actually ebb and flow enormously with the political winds (the ebbing during the previous administration being an important factor in the uselessness of the intel integration prior to 9/11)... but it takes the burning of enormous political capital, and usually a lot of sacrificial lambs, to see anything like a change in the trend towards a more pervasive nanny state. I think that the immigration issue is going to bring about another bout of such turbulence, but we'll see. I find that to be an area where the lack of (will)power and authority (both moral and tactical) is going to really turn out to have bitten us in the ass all these years.
I'm glad I amuse you, though. We're not talking "sides," here, as much as we're talking about my deep-down allergy to much of the silliness that gets bandied about here by people that I think have not yet (and may never, as easy as life is for so many these days) connected with the real world - and especially with some of the more actively dangerous people in it.
But IF... IF this spying program is meant to protect Americans from potential terrorist attacks, wouldn't it be better AS public knowledge?
No. The knowledge you want out there is that which would be circulating only among some loosely affiliated cells of bad guys. You know, "Damn... we had that info exchange with Ahmed in Boston, and now I can't get hold of him. We'd better wait on what we're doing, and maybe try to get hold of those guys we've been talking to in Jordan..." etc. You don't want the bad guys knowing the actual techniques you're using to follow their communications. It's fine for them to wonder why they're getting tripped up, or wonder how the bank knew to close some account they were using to buy disposable cell phones... but but wondering is better than knowing specifically what to avoid.
...the public is the ultimate authority, so there is no difference between revealing information to the public and revealing it to the authorities.
The idea that there is a difference is a relic of the idea of government by a king whose authority came from some combination of divine grant, parentage, etc., and had nothing to do with the will of the people.
Nonsense. You're forgetting that part of the people's will is that their government act to do things dealing with security, especially needed against organizations and individuals who have said that they'll seek to kill US citizens and harm the economy, have actually done so more than once, and are saying, right now, that they are actively seeking to do more of the same. So, given that there is at least some appropriate, tangible activity for the counter-terrorism types to work on, and for the defense agencies to be working on... is it your contention that nothing they do should be kept out of general public info-circulation?
Personally, I don't think that, say, some North Korean agent working in South Korea should have ready access to the surveilance that we're using to track ships full of North Korean drugs, missiles, and counterfeit currency. And I don't think that someone who suddenly decides that Kim Jong Il is a Really Swell Guy should be considered a "whistleblower" when the programs aimed at monitoring that or a similarly troublesome organization are blabbed to the NYT to score political points.
Who cares if the "the public" is the ultimate arbitor of what's right/wrong? We elect people and have long-standing policies that happen to require a certain amount of secrecy in the interests of critical jobs. If you don't like the fact that secrecy is part of the mission, elect someone who promises to have no secrets. You'll have a lot of work to do, convincing a majority of voters that their Coast Guard, or their counter-intel agencies should operate in complete transparency for your comfort, with Iran or China thus having total access to the same information. Just like Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the NSA activity years ago, senior members of both parties in the house and senate are, and always have been well aware of the programs that they fund. Is it that you think people like Pelosi are just too dumb to understand what they're being briefed on? Then elect smarter representatives.
The question is, when will the dam finally burst? When will we see headlines talking about impeachment?
Yes, that is a horrible, witless analogy. Impeachments aren't waiting in the wings, held back by some action from an administration. They are brought to the person in question based on actions, lying to grand juries, etc (ask the last president).
If you're paying any attention to this story beyond simple partisan axe grinding, you'll find that people like Bush's arch-nemises in the house and senate (like Nancy Pelosi) have been briefed on these exact NSA programs since 2001, just weeks after 9/11. Why do you think that only the wingnuts, and not the actual-in-the-know political opposition (which would love to do anything to embarass Bush) aren't being very vocal on this particular subject? Because they know what it really does, have known about it for years, and recognize what a serious breach it is to have it spilling about in the news. Of course they don't mind the political damage it's causing when it's absurdly, factlessly spun in the media, but people like Pelosi know better than to directly attack on this subject - because she's in the same loop and has been for years.
Will there ever be an end to the war on terra?
It's so simple! Since it doesn't actually exist, all you have to do is stop uttering that stupid meme, and it goes away. Poof! You win the war on terra.
Doing technical things can't be done properly unless insightful scientists and engineers are free of constraints on their insight, allowed to bypass the directional controls that management so loves, uninhibited from pointing our core problems in fear of their careers, and totally unshackled from the demands of time management.
Right, because management by committee and fistfight works so much better. We're not talking about one-man research projects, here. We're talking about things that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require thousands of people to execute. Do you really know enough brilliant engineers that will all work together on Mars-sized projects while "totally unshackled from the demands of time management" to create anything on a schedule that will actually line up with unforgiving orbital mechanics?
These projects have to be designed and built in a (typical) evironment where people die, get married, get sick, and otherwise come and go from projects. Which Alpha Nerd are you going to point to in order to keep things moving along? How will you actually demonstrate any sort of accountability to the citizens that actually PAY for this stuff if there's no management to string up? Do you really mean that you'd rather the brilliant engineers lose their jobs when something flames out? Because it is going to happen, whether an engineer manages the project or a manager manages the project. It's for sure going to happen if no one manages the project. On the other hand, unshackling people from any time management constraints will actually ensure that nothing ever gets done, so at least that way nothing will ever crash and burn... except for what's left of public support for the space program.
Because it's convenient for a thousand other related tasks, maybe? And, out of curiosity, why would you put an apostrophe in the middle of the word "want"?
If it doesn't involve muscle, beatings, guns, and any other kind of physical violence, they pretty much have no idea how to deal with it.
Which doesn't exactly jive with the entire departments/divisions dedicated to white collar crimes like embezzlement, or child predation, or securities fraud, etc. Plenty of people are prosecuted for such things every day.
What makes you think that the brain dead people in say, the FBI could figure out what an IP address is?
Is that really what you think? That people with advanced degrees in CS or years of practical training and experience in IT forensics aren't as able to understand IP networking as a 10 year old kid playing WoW? Despite your axe-grinding rhetoric, I'm guessing that even you know that's not even close to true.
Even i remember witnesses saying things like car-bombs, truck bombs, and even missles. Which witness do we actually trust? The ones the government backs up?
In what way is the government "backing up" the people that, sitting in traffic, watched the airplane go right over their heads and into the building? You can definitely get people to say anything, but someone who says "truck bomb" is going to have an interesting conversation with the people who were on the phone with TV and radio reporters within minutes of plane hitting the Pentagon and said they saw the airline's logo on the tail, etc. They saw it. Dozens and dozens of people sitting right there, within a hundred or two yards of the actual impact, watched it happen. You want to know which witnesses to trust? How about the ones that, unaware of each other's reporting of events, all said basically the same thing. The odd fruitloop reporting something different in order to get attention, grind some axe, or at the mercy of an addled brain is noise in the information.
If we were talking about 2 witnesses that said "I saw an AA 757 fly right into the building" and just as many that said "I saw truck dive into the building", that would be one thing. But that's not what we have.
The problem is that there is not a clear view of a 747 running into the pentagon. Just a streak and a fireball. Kinda like those UFO pictures and videos.
Well, yes, that's a problem for people that only believe what they see on what they presume to be un-alterable video tape... but why not just ask the people that watched it happen.
Won't this ruling hurt the garage inventor that doesn't have the business accumen to bring a product to market, but has the creativity needed to make new stuff?
Is the ruling, in essence, "patents were made to protect products, not ideas"?
No, the ruling doesn't in any way change what is or is not protected by a patent... it just changes what sort of immediate business-ruining action (through injunction) a patent holder can take while trying to get things sorted out. For someone that only holds on to patents for the purpose of suing productive parties actually making money on the technology/idea in question, it's a poke in the eye (good!). For someone that can legitmately demonstrate that another company is running around making money on their patented idea... well, this doesn't stop them from still forcing a change and collecting damages as appropriate, just as they'd always have done.
Now, the only reason I can see the ol' injunction still having merit would be when the patent holder can show that, say, every day the Bad Guys are doing business with the other company's patented idea, the other company is losing out on a future market that may just never come back their way. Some ideas only have a certain useful life, or once another company has made a market entry with it, it's the end of the opportunity, no matter what happens in court later. The ruling here provides courts with an opportunity to still review and act on such things, but not to reflexively grant an injunction just because someone says they should. They have to actually think about the situation. It's a good thing.
Of course you have police forces and intelligence agencies out there to be forever vigilant against people who would want to harm us. It doesn't mean we should fear those who would harm us, but here we are, acting like cowards all the time.
Who's "we?" That's my point. The vigilant people you're talking about aren't acting out of fear - it's their job, and an important one. They're going to keep doing it whether or not some soccer mom is scared that her kids will die at the hands of terrorists the way so many did in that school in Beslan. Are you acting afraid? You seem to say not. I'm not acting afraid. My many friends and family (some of which hold the jobs we're talking about) aren't acting afraid. So why are you using the term "we"? Do you mean "CBS News?" Or, "school principals?"
Suggesting that the entire country is sitting around quaking in our shoes just because some people do is like saying that "we" as a country all think that socialized medicine is better, or that "we" think taxes should be higher, or that "we" find guns more dangerous than cars, or any other obviously non-unanimous position is "our" mode of being. It's nonsense.
Proactive vigilence against this newly more dangerous form of nation- and economy-threatening risk is a job, not a position of fear. I don't care if someone you've met or chatted with acts fearful or not... that doesn't change the obligation to act.
So you find some inconsistency in the arguments of people who simultaneously complain:
- we should have connected the dots
- it's ineffective/illegal/un-American) to add billions of new dots
Not at all. I'm talking about the people who say we should be able to connect the dots, but then complain when the exact sort of resources (in the form of consolidated, pre-indexed data warehouses that don't require a lot of possibly priceless time to dig into) needed to respond to the finding of a "dot" is built. When a counter-terrorism analyst comes across something possibly meaningful (like a bad guy's phone), the ability to immediately get results from an investigative query... and to pursue those when a hard-to-pin-down, clever target hasn't had as much time to fade away or change to another disposable cell phone like he does every Tuesday... is a good thing. It doesn't change the responsibilities of those doing the investigations, and it doesn't change the trouble that people can and should get into for abusing the long standing ability to troll through phone records. It just makes it easier to acquire rapidly moving targets in a time when "rapid" is the difference between getting and missing someone planning, financing, or executing something really ugly.
Having that data warehouse pre-indexed (the same data we've always had, but in less gracefully useful formats) doesn't "add dots," it connects them, if and when you have a good reason to go looking. Just like it always has, only the investigator who has a reason to look can now get a much more timely response. Not a different one, but a more meaningful one, in the context of stopping or apprehending the kinds of rings that were already being worked on (by counter-terrorism teams) as they planned and executed the Madrid train bombings.
You're claiming it was impossible to predict 9/11 with the powers the government had on 9/11?
No, I'm saying (again): people who don't like the capacity to dig for a calling pattern when we're quickly presented with insight into a cell or network's possible activity should just be sure not to later complain that a bunch of people using cell phones to coordinate something weren't connected with the tell-tale money transfers, expired visas, or other tell-tale things that stick out like a sore thumb. Can't have it both ways.
Well, there is the theory that they shot down one of them, which makes more sense than any other heart-warming "Lets Roll" theory.
Really? Makes more sense than the actual dozens of conversations between ATC, airline staff, operators, and blood relatives of the people on the plane? I'm surprised that you're not spouting the "we attacked the WTC ourselves" mantra, or perhaps embracing the quaint theory that the airplane people watched flying into the Pentagon was really a missle, blah blah. Turn off the X-Files re-runs and use your brain for a second.
Such as a plane crashing into a building.
Right! The fact that a plane had just crashed into a building provided immediate, concrete, reliable-enough-to-kill-citizens information on which of a thousand or so other planes in the air needed to be shot down within the next few minutes. You must really think that the previous administration had ironed out all of that, logistically, as well, right? So, when Bill Clinto was, say, being serviced in the Oval Office, he would have been immediately able to issue an order, using established protocol, to shoot down just the right plane?
Or maybe you're a little confused about just what the president does and does not actually do in the space of a few minutes following a vague, ill-defined, at-that-point-contextless piece of news. As in, "Mr. President, we think a terrorist just flew a plane into the WTC." And... he's supposed to say, "execute plan super-duper Alpha 10, and shoot down the next plane, right now, before it hits the next building." "Gee, Mr. President, we don't have that sort of information, and the sort of things we'd need to have in place with the pilots, the airlines, the FAA and every branch of the military including local Guard pilots."
They have many F-16's on hand, ready for immediate takeoff. All they had to do was issue the order.
Great! F-16s in the air! There! Everything's better now. Oh, except which of a thousand planes do you shoot down? How do you get hundreds of armed F-16s, with pilots trained in shooting down domestic aircraft over population centers, within shoot-down range of every plane in the US airspace within the space of the few minutes needed before the next plane hits? Oh, I see - a few billion dollars worth of new communications equipment, logistical planning, training, and other things that would have to have been in place and rehearsed for years before hand. Sort of like we're doing now, but not at all like what the administration for the 8 years prior was doing. Is that what you're talking about?
The more you fear this enemy, the more power they have. If you decide that it's worth fearing terrorists because you lost a loved one in a terrorist attack, then you're pissing on their graves.
You're setting up a false dichotomy. I don't fear a mosquito sucking blood out of my forehead, but that doesn't mean I won't swat it. Recognizing a risk is not the same as trembling in fear. If you had someone open up a nice shiny new abandoned crack-house next door to you, would you say that having the police do something about it is entirely motivated by fear? If one of your neighbors is afraid of what some crack-addled person might do to score another hit, and a different neighbor simply doesn't want the annoyance or to (through inaction) imply that taking over houses and using them as Crack-Marts is OK (actual fear or not)... does the fact that one person does fear the situation make another person's reasonable action somehow cowardly?
It isn't a matter of Fear = Action, No Fear = Inaction. Whether or not I personally feel like I have a bigger chance of dying (BTW, living just a few miles down wind from the center of DC probably makes that actually the case, but I digress) or seeing my family injured by a smoked tanker car full of industrial chlorine (they roll more or less right past my house) doesn't mean I'm acting out of some cowardly fear to seek to reduce the odds of that happening. Yes, it could happen accidentally (and we act to prevent that, already). And yes it could happen through a somewhat coordinated action taken by just a few people - and yes, who's calling who may or may not be the info that prevents that from happening. But is having the ability to ask a judge if we can go mining for call patterns, on the fly... and already having that raw data indexed, problematic? I don't know - it depends on whether the judge (or panel thereof) would be the right ones to ask.
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If Congressw did that then why are they now upset at the excesses?
They're not, that's the whole point. Some of them are squeezing this for momentary political advantage. Period. You'll notice that the key figures in both houses are not calling for a stop to the programs they were briefed on. They think the program should continue, because even they find it valuable... they just want to be able to at the same time try to find a way to score against their political opponents while talking about the program's origins.
Secret prisons
Well, not any more, unfortunately, because of leaks. We have important new allies in eastern Europe. Some of them are very anxious to help tamp down Islamic extremism, living as they do so close to it. Those countries (like Poland, or Romania) are very supportive, but have limited resources at this point. Providing geographically closer places to set aside, question, and house people snagged during overease raids on the organizations funding and operating terrorists in dozens of countries... very valuable. Mostly because the people those people were working with don't know where their co-conspirators are, or whether (like KSM) they'd given up tons of priceless information about how cells work, communicate, etc.
imprisonment without trial
Detention, you mean? As in, taking a combatant out of the area in which he's been blowing people up, shooting at cargo trucks, funneling cash to people that chop the heads off of journalists, that sort of thing? Exactly which local US criminal laws would you use against someone who is caught with a truckload of weapons, having just planted an IED along side a convoy route in Afghanistan? Under normal military circumstances, that person would be prisoner of war, and would be held without any trial or possibility of release until the conflict is over... though if that person could be found ot have been deliberately targeting civilians, etc., they might be tried on war crimes. Except... these guys are not in uniform, don't answer to governmental chain of command, and are also not always citizens of the countries in which they're killing people (or supporting those that do). So: you'd rather let them go right back to what they're doing? Or would you rather take them out of action while we do everything we can to dismantle the operation they're working with, and make their purpose (say, stopping democracy from taking hold in Iraq or returning the Taliban to power in Afghanistan) a lost cause?
all clearly illegal (and NOT authorized by the USA Patriot Act)
The PATRIOT act relates to dropping counterproductive barriers between intelligence agencies so that they can actually get some work done. That's completely separate from the other acts and funding passed through congress that expressly empowered the president to work within the framework of a war footing, even though we're dealing with a type of conflict and threat with which no previous administration has had to contend. Well, Clinton had to contend with it, he just didn't really do anything about it that mattered. Dead embassy workers and civilians across Africa, dead sailors on the Cole... those things weren't enough to gin up the required support in Congress at the time, apparently... or he didn't seem to be suggesting he was willing and able to actually press the Taliban, etc., in a permanent, irreversible way. So, after 9/11 there's enough of a sense of urgency to do something about it, and authority's granted to the correct branch of government to act. Meanwhile, the senior reps get regular briefings and have to regularly approve funding for all it. Does that mean that we shouldn't worry when some complete twit out of his element and running guard details at a prison in Iraq decides to be a jackass and take pictures of humiliated prisoners? No. Off to jail with him, actually. Does that mean we have to be extra special nice, and treat Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a key 9/11 organizer, like a cushy white collar criminal while convincing him to tell us what he knows? No. Depriving terrorist financiers and bomb-planters of creature comforts is not torture.
Pelosi is never briefed on secret programs since she is not a member of the Intelligence Committees.
Wake up. In October, 2001, Pelosi was the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committe. She even wrote to the NSA director following a briefing on these exact programs at that time. If she was so sure that the agency was being directed to do something illegal, her inquiries about it sure weren't phrased that way. And she continued to vote to fund exactly these activities for years following the events that triggered the need. She sat in the room and heard the words "NSA", "telephone records", "database" and all the rest. Perhaps you're suggesting she's too dumb to grasp what was being explained to her? Not the sort of person you want on an intelligence oversight committee, if that's the case.
What kind of oversight is that?
The kind that you, as a congressional representative, vote on. Which she did, and continued to... because even she knows that this area of activity is not just some administration power play, it's the intel agencies' jobs, and leaders of both parties in both the senate and the house were well aware of it, and to this day indicate that they don't want it to stop. Pelosi included. She's just spinning semantics for political traction in other areas.
It's an Israeli company.
Great, then screw 'em, all the more so. Of all people, the Israelis should know better than to harbor that sort of trash on their local infrastructure. I have no problem using a little pressure to remind them why they should put a thousandth of the energy they put into tracking down Hamas-financed suburban missle attackers and stamp out the local spam twits. That is, if they want to maintain their image as the primary bastion of democracy, rule of law, and more-or-less sensibility in the middle east.
Bush taking exceptional powers because of the War on Terror is as absurd as it would have been for Johnson to have called himself a wartime President because of the War on Poverty, or Bush Senior for the War on Drugs
It may be a clunky label to use for a wide-ranging conflict with militant islamo-fascists, but that didn't stop Congress from, in the wake of thousands of citizens being killed by an identifiable, repeat-offender group, extending to the executive branch exactly the military/intel options needed (and now being used). If you're going to thump the table while citing history, at least cite all of it.
Actually if this were aimed at a bigger company I'd be surprised if the current US administration didn't want to jump in to protect the business. Of course they'd hype it as a live fire test and play down the business side.
Well, gee, we sure wouldn't want to be seen protecting US businesses from foreign attack. That would be unseemly! After all, they're just made up of US citizens, providing jobs, fueling the stock market and millions of people's family investments. Much better to what... convey the impression that government should leave business targets to fend for themselves in the face of a demonstrable attack from overseas? Acting under such circumstances is easier (than acting in deal with a wave of spam from thousands of bots pointed at thousands of mail servers), it goes farther to signal to everyone involved that the economy as a whole is not a workable target.
Pulling the plug on foreign network access is probably not the solution though... but massive DoS against targets ON those networks sure is. Just stop up their pipes so that they can't interact usefully with their botnets.
Yup, and I'd have loved to have seen the US gov use this as a perfect 'live fire' exercise. After all, if they can't stop a few punk spammers how can we have any confidence they could stop a determined attack by the usual terrorist suspects?
My first reaction is to agree with you, partly just because I'd like to see the full might of our larger teams of spookier cyber-folks brought to bear on the spammers... but I'm thinking that this might be one of those things that would squander the public debut of some of those capabilities. I'd rather that we save such visible displays for when it matters (more). This matters, but perhaps not as much as deliberate attack on larger or more public pieces of the infrastructure.
I don't mind abuses of power or violations of the due process of law, because they're being done by the people I voted for
Nope. I either do - or don't - like what the people I have - or have not - voted for did, do, or will do. Actual actions (or appropriate resistance to action), not "feel your pain" speeches or general hand wringing or feel-good legislation that accomplishes nothing. That applies to both parties.
"It's completely untrue that I am on the side of authority on every issue. I in fact strongly oppose the use of authority against me. I only advocate authority when the authority is being used against people other than me. So this isn't about sides, really."
Even you don't think that's how I think, or you wouldn't have to sound so snide saying it. I'm personally comfortable with the fact that there are objectively reasonable, rational uses for government authority and force and clandestine activity, just as there are objectively clear situations where it's inappropriate. Unless you're going to take the position of the pure there-is-no-right-and-wrong moral relativist, what this comes down to is clarifying what's right and not. So, unless I'm doing something illegal, you're right that I don't think authority should be used "on" me. And unless you're posing a threat, the same applies for you. It's not about me vs. everyone else, it's about what I, and everyone else does.
You're forgetting one thing. The NSA doing domestic spying is illegal. In effect, the government has promised the people that the NSA will not spy on them, and is standing accused of breaking that promise
How can I be forgetting that? It's what we're talking about. What part of "not monitoring domestic calls" are you equating with spying? And if compiling telco call records is what has you worried, why were you not complaining for the last many decades when law enforcement and intel agencies have had all the warrantless access to that info they could ask for? Were you complaining eight years ago when the Clinton administration's Justice Department could and did use the same access to telco records for investigations at the time? Or that your local PD can and does do exactly the same thing every day? I'm not forgetting anything, I'm reminding you.
If you actually support domestic spying without warrants, then that is far more damning than the words I might have put in your mouth.
Actually, what I'm doing is calling BS on the people who only say they don't like something when it's their most-of-the-time political antagonists who happen to be in office. Would I support domestic tapping of my calls without warrant? No. Would I support some fed throwing a dart and looking at my phone records because I happen to have a customer in Turkey? No. Would I be very, very glad if there was a pre-indexed momma of a database that could be mined as needed if an analyst sifting through Al Zarqawi's backpack comes up with a NY telephone number? Yes. It's what you DO with call logs, not whether they're available. They were available, without warrant, before this administration, and they're available now. The difference is the ability to prep those records for the sort of timely research that's called for when you're more worried about what's on a freight container that cleared customs two days ago than you are about large-scale troop movements (and other not-like-they-used-to-be issues).
Mostly, I'm just taking a poke at the people who don't care about whether or not their politicians have heard plenty of briefings that include "domestic calls," "compile database," and "NSA" in the same sentence, but which do care when someone they don't like for other reasons is involved.
"Democrats do horrible things too, so don't complain when we do horrible things. Democrats in Congress voted for the USA PATRIOT Act, so stop blaming us."
You're putting words in my mouth. I think that pre-indexing call logs (always available, warrantlessly, to law enforcement anyway) is a pretty good thing to do, in terms of allowing speedy, on-the-fly follow-up of intel related to fleeting, evasive terrorist types. Mind you, no connection to that sort of intel work makes such poking and prodding into that data by investigators unseemly, and I don't like it.
But you're implying that I think the actions taken to analyze bad-guy-communications in the wake of 9/11 (when it was pretty obvious that there were trails to follow) is across-the-board bad, and that I'm saying, "see, Democrats do bad things too." You're wrong. I'm saying, "see, for once some Democrats get the problem, and what's more, they're actually being a little bit circumspect about how they sling mud relative to what they know has to be done."
That's really not the same as the words you were putting in my mouth.
Scentcone, you are my favorite slashdot troll.
Um, gee, thanks.
I don't think you are a troll really though, I think you just happen to be on the side of power and authority on every issue.
Not really. In fact I am completely repulsed by all sorts of government policies, overreaching, and "it takes a village" type nonsense. I can't stand, for example, the current administration's (and that of many members of it's party) take on issues like abortion, stem cell research, etc. It's crazy.
On the side of power? Pay closer attention to the things I say. First, there's context... I'm usually replying to some completely irrational and overwrought expression of hatred for businesses, governments, etc. Some balance is appropriate in a venue like this, even if it's just as a voice in the wilderness. That said, I also dislike certain types of power grabs: I don't like the way certain unions, for example, attempt to leverage what's left of their image to force their members to pretend they all have exactly the same political leanings. I don't like the awesome, nearly unstoppable power of undereducated, non-critical-thinking masses being manipulated by a shallow, callow interchangeable celebrity artistocracy. I don't like exactly the same thing when it comes to organized religion.
Authority? I don't like that which I can't vote out of existence. I'm not talking as much about individual people in one office or the next, but about social programs and other entitlements that tend to get an undue amount of intertia and are almost impervious to change. Organizations like the military or the intelligence agencies actually ebb and flow enormously with the political winds (the ebbing during the previous administration being an important factor in the uselessness of the intel integration prior to 9/11)... but it takes the burning of enormous political capital, and usually a lot of sacrificial lambs, to see anything like a change in the trend towards a more pervasive nanny state. I think that the immigration issue is going to bring about another bout of such turbulence, but we'll see. I find that to be an area where the lack of (will)power and authority (both moral and tactical) is going to really turn out to have bitten us in the ass all these years.
I'm glad I amuse you, though. We're not talking "sides," here, as much as we're talking about my deep-down allergy to much of the silliness that gets bandied about here by people that I think have not yet (and may never, as easy as life is for so many these days) connected with the real world - and especially with some of the more actively dangerous people in it.
But IF... IF this spying program is meant to protect Americans from potential terrorist attacks, wouldn't it be better AS public knowledge?
No. The knowledge you want out there is that which would be circulating only among some loosely affiliated cells of bad guys. You know, "Damn... we had that info exchange with Ahmed in Boston, and now I can't get hold of him. We'd better wait on what we're doing, and maybe try to get hold of those guys we've been talking to in Jordan..." etc. You don't want the bad guys knowing the actual techniques you're using to follow their communications. It's fine for them to wonder why they're getting tripped up, or wonder how the bank knew to close some account they were using to buy disposable cell phones... but but wondering is better than knowing specifically what to avoid.
...the public is the ultimate authority, so there is no difference between revealing information to the public and revealing it to the authorities.
The idea that there is a difference is a relic of the idea of government by a king whose authority came from some combination of divine grant, parentage, etc., and had nothing to do with the will of the people.
Nonsense. You're forgetting that part of the people's will is that their government act to do things dealing with security, especially needed against organizations and individuals who have said that they'll seek to kill US citizens and harm the economy, have actually done so more than once, and are saying, right now, that they are actively seeking to do more of the same. So, given that there is at least some appropriate, tangible activity for the counter-terrorism types to work on, and for the defense agencies to be working on... is it your contention that nothing they do should be kept out of general public info-circulation?
Personally, I don't think that, say, some North Korean agent working in South Korea should have ready access to the surveilance that we're using to track ships full of North Korean drugs, missiles, and counterfeit currency. And I don't think that someone who suddenly decides that Kim Jong Il is a Really Swell Guy should be considered a "whistleblower" when the programs aimed at monitoring that or a similarly troublesome organization are blabbed to the NYT to score political points.
Who cares if the "the public" is the ultimate arbitor of what's right/wrong? We elect people and have long-standing policies that happen to require a certain amount of secrecy in the interests of critical jobs. If you don't like the fact that secrecy is part of the mission, elect someone who promises to have no secrets. You'll have a lot of work to do, convincing a majority of voters that their Coast Guard, or their counter-intel agencies should operate in complete transparency for your comfort, with Iran or China thus having total access to the same information. Just like Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the NSA activity years ago, senior members of both parties in the house and senate are, and always have been well aware of the programs that they fund. Is it that you think people like Pelosi are just too dumb to understand what they're being briefed on? Then elect smarter representatives.
The question is, when will the dam finally burst? When will we see headlines talking about impeachment?
Yes, that is a horrible, witless analogy. Impeachments aren't waiting in the wings, held back by some action from an administration. They are brought to the person in question based on actions, lying to grand juries, etc (ask the last president).
If you're paying any attention to this story beyond simple partisan axe grinding, you'll find that people like Bush's arch-nemises in the house and senate (like Nancy Pelosi) have been briefed on these exact NSA programs since 2001, just weeks after 9/11. Why do you think that only the wingnuts, and not the actual-in-the-know political opposition (which would love to do anything to embarass Bush) aren't being very vocal on this particular subject? Because they know what it really does, have known about it for years, and recognize what a serious breach it is to have it spilling about in the news. Of course they don't mind the political damage it's causing when it's absurdly, factlessly spun in the media, but people like Pelosi know better than to directly attack on this subject - because she's in the same loop and has been for years.
Will there ever be an end to the war on terra?
It's so simple! Since it doesn't actually exist, all you have to do is stop uttering that stupid meme, and it goes away. Poof! You win the war on terra.
Doing technical things can't be done properly unless insightful scientists and engineers are free of constraints on their insight, allowed to bypass the directional controls that management so loves, uninhibited from pointing our core problems in fear of their careers, and totally unshackled from the demands of time management.
Right, because management by committee and fistfight works so much better. We're not talking about one-man research projects, here. We're talking about things that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require thousands of people to execute. Do you really know enough brilliant engineers that will all work together on Mars-sized projects while "totally unshackled from the demands of time management" to create anything on a schedule that will actually line up with unforgiving orbital mechanics?
These projects have to be designed and built in a (typical) evironment where people die, get married, get sick, and otherwise come and go from projects. Which Alpha Nerd are you going to point to in order to keep things moving along? How will you actually demonstrate any sort of accountability to the citizens that actually PAY for this stuff if there's no management to string up? Do you really mean that you'd rather the brilliant engineers lose their jobs when something flames out? Because it is going to happen, whether an engineer manages the project or a manager manages the project. It's for sure going to happen if no one manages the project. On the other hand, unshackling people from any time management constraints will actually ensure that nothing ever gets done, so at least that way nothing will ever crash and burn... except for what's left of public support for the space program.
Why would you wan't to do statistics in excel?
Because it's convenient for a thousand other related tasks, maybe? And, out of curiosity, why would you put an apostrophe in the middle of the word "want"?
If it doesn't involve muscle, beatings, guns, and any other kind of physical violence, they pretty much have no idea how to deal with it.
Which doesn't exactly jive with the entire departments/divisions dedicated to white collar crimes like embezzlement, or child predation, or securities fraud, etc. Plenty of people are prosecuted for such things every day.
What makes you think that the brain dead people in say, the FBI could figure out what an IP address is?
Is that really what you think? That people with advanced degrees in CS or years of practical training and experience in IT forensics aren't as able to understand IP networking as a 10 year old kid playing WoW? Despite your axe-grinding rhetoric, I'm guessing that even you know that's not even close to true.
Even i remember witnesses saying things like car-bombs, truck bombs, and even missles. Which witness do we actually trust? The ones the government backs up?
In what way is the government "backing up" the people that, sitting in traffic, watched the airplane go right over their heads and into the building? You can definitely get people to say anything, but someone who says "truck bomb" is going to have an interesting conversation with the people who were on the phone with TV and radio reporters within minutes of plane hitting the Pentagon and said they saw the airline's logo on the tail, etc. They saw it. Dozens and dozens of people sitting right there, within a hundred or two yards of the actual impact, watched it happen. You want to know which witnesses to trust? How about the ones that, unaware of each other's reporting of events, all said basically the same thing. The odd fruitloop reporting something different in order to get attention, grind some axe, or at the mercy of an addled brain is noise in the information.
If we were talking about 2 witnesses that said "I saw an AA 757 fly right into the building" and just as many that said "I saw truck dive into the building", that would be one thing. But that's not what we have.
The problem is that there is not a clear view of a 747 running into the pentagon. Just a streak and a fireball. Kinda like those UFO pictures and videos.
Well, yes, that's a problem for people that only believe what they see on what they presume to be un-alterable video tape... but why not just ask the people that watched it happen.
Won't this ruling hurt the garage inventor that doesn't have the business accumen to bring a product to market, but has the creativity needed to make new stuff?
Is the ruling, in essence, "patents were made to protect products, not ideas"?
No, the ruling doesn't in any way change what is or is not protected by a patent... it just changes what sort of immediate business-ruining action (through injunction) a patent holder can take while trying to get things sorted out. For someone that only holds on to patents for the purpose of suing productive parties actually making money on the technology/idea in question, it's a poke in the eye (good!). For someone that can legitmately demonstrate that another company is running around making money on their patented idea... well, this doesn't stop them from still forcing a change and collecting damages as appropriate, just as they'd always have done.
Now, the only reason I can see the ol' injunction still having merit would be when the patent holder can show that, say, every day the Bad Guys are doing business with the other company's patented idea, the other company is losing out on a future market that may just never come back their way. Some ideas only have a certain useful life, or once another company has made a market entry with it, it's the end of the opportunity, no matter what happens in court later. The ruling here provides courts with an opportunity to still review and act on such things, but not to reflexively grant an injunction just because someone says they should. They have to actually think about the situation. It's a good thing.
Of course you have police forces and intelligence agencies out there to be forever vigilant against people who would want to harm us. It doesn't mean we should fear those who would harm us, but here we are, acting like cowards all the time.
Who's "we?" That's my point. The vigilant people you're talking about aren't acting out of fear - it's their job, and an important one. They're going to keep doing it whether or not some soccer mom is scared that her kids will die at the hands of terrorists the way so many did in that school in Beslan. Are you acting afraid? You seem to say not. I'm not acting afraid. My many friends and family (some of which hold the jobs we're talking about) aren't acting afraid. So why are you using the term "we"? Do you mean "CBS News?" Or, "school principals?"
Suggesting that the entire country is sitting around quaking in our shoes just because some people do is like saying that "we" as a country all think that socialized medicine is better, or that "we" think taxes should be higher, or that "we" find guns more dangerous than cars, or any other obviously non-unanimous position is "our" mode of being. It's nonsense.
Proactive vigilence against this newly more dangerous form of nation- and economy-threatening risk is a job, not a position of fear. I don't care if someone you've met or chatted with acts fearful or not... that doesn't change the obligation to act.
We have lots of enemies. We don't act like a bunch of scared children when we think about most of them.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do something about them. And you seem to equate doing something with being fearful... that's the false dichotomy.
So you find some inconsistency in the arguments of people who simultaneously complain:
... is a good thing. It doesn't change the responsibilities of those doing the investigations, and it doesn't change the trouble that people can and should get into for abusing the long standing ability to troll through phone records. It just makes it easier to acquire rapidly moving targets in a time when "rapid" is the difference between getting and missing someone planning, financing, or executing something really ugly.
- we should have connected the dots
- it's ineffective/illegal/un-American) to add billions of new dots
Not at all. I'm talking about the people who say we should be able to connect the dots, but then complain when the exact sort of resources (in the form of consolidated, pre-indexed data warehouses that don't require a lot of possibly priceless time to dig into) needed to respond to the finding of a "dot" is built. When a counter-terrorism analyst comes across something possibly meaningful (like a bad guy's phone), the ability to immediately get results from an investigative query... and to pursue those when a hard-to-pin-down, clever target hasn't had as much time to fade away or change to another disposable cell phone like he does every Tuesday
Having that data warehouse pre-indexed (the same data we've always had, but in less gracefully useful formats) doesn't "add dots," it connects them, if and when you have a good reason to go looking. Just like it always has, only the investigator who has a reason to look can now get a much more timely response. Not a different one, but a more meaningful one, in the context of stopping or apprehending the kinds of rings that were already being worked on (by counter-terrorism teams) as they planned and executed the Madrid train bombings.
You're claiming it was impossible to predict 9/11 with the powers the government had on 9/11?
No, I'm saying (again): people who don't like the capacity to dig for a calling pattern when we're quickly presented with insight into a cell or network's possible activity should just be sure not to later complain that a bunch of people using cell phones to coordinate something weren't connected with the tell-tale money transfers, expired visas, or other tell-tale things that stick out like a sore thumb. Can't have it both ways.
Well, there is the theory that they shot down one of them, which makes more sense than any other heart-warming "Lets Roll" theory.
Really? Makes more sense than the actual dozens of conversations between ATC, airline staff, operators, and blood relatives of the people on the plane? I'm surprised that you're not spouting the "we attacked the WTC ourselves" mantra, or perhaps embracing the quaint theory that the airplane people watched flying into the Pentagon was really a missle, blah blah. Turn off the X-Files re-runs and use your brain for a second.
Such as a plane crashing into a building.
Right! The fact that a plane had just crashed into a building provided immediate, concrete, reliable-enough-to-kill-citizens information on which of a thousand or so other planes in the air needed to be shot down within the next few minutes. You must really think that the previous administration had ironed out all of that, logistically, as well, right? So, when Bill Clinto was, say, being serviced in the Oval Office, he would have been immediately able to issue an order, using established protocol, to shoot down just the right plane?
Or maybe you're a little confused about just what the president does and does not actually do in the space of a few minutes following a vague, ill-defined, at-that-point-contextless piece of news. As in, "Mr. President, we think a terrorist just flew a plane into the WTC." And... he's supposed to say, "execute plan super-duper Alpha 10, and shoot down the next plane, right now, before it hits the next building." "Gee, Mr. President, we don't have that sort of information, and the sort of things we'd need to have in place with the pilots, the airlines, the FAA and every branch of the military including local Guard pilots."
They have many F-16's on hand, ready for immediate takeoff. All they had to do was issue the order.
Great! F-16s in the air! There! Everything's better now. Oh, except which of a thousand planes do you shoot down? How do you get hundreds of armed F-16s, with pilots trained in shooting down domestic aircraft over population centers, within shoot-down range of every plane in the US airspace within the space of the few minutes needed before the next plane hits? Oh, I see - a few billion dollars worth of new communications equipment, logistical planning, training, and other things that would have to have been in place and rehearsed for years before hand. Sort of like we're doing now, but not at all like what the administration for the 8 years prior was doing. Is that what you're talking about?
The more you fear this enemy, the more power they have. If you decide that it's worth fearing terrorists because you lost a loved one in a terrorist attack, then you're pissing on their graves.
You're setting up a false dichotomy. I don't fear a mosquito sucking blood out of my forehead, but that doesn't mean I won't swat it. Recognizing a risk is not the same as trembling in fear. If you had someone open up a nice shiny new abandoned crack-house next door to you, would you say that having the police do something about it is entirely motivated by fear? If one of your neighbors is afraid of what some crack-addled person might do to score another hit, and a different neighbor simply doesn't want the annoyance or to (through inaction) imply that taking over houses and using them as Crack-Marts is OK (actual fear or not)... does the fact that one person does fear the situation make another person's reasonable action somehow cowardly?
It isn't a matter of Fear = Action, No Fear = Inaction. Whether or not I personally feel like I have a bigger chance of dying (BTW, living just a few miles down wind from the center of DC probably makes that actually the case, but I digress) or seeing my family injured by a smoked tanker car full of industrial chlorine (they roll more or less right past my house) doesn't mean I'm acting out of some cowardly fear to seek to reduce the odds of that happening. Yes, it could happen accidentally (and we act to prevent that, already). And yes it could happen through a somewhat coordinated action taken by just a few people - and yes, who's calling who may or may not be the info that prevents that from happening. But is having the ability to ask a judge if we can go mining for call patterns, on the fly... and already having that raw data indexed, problematic? I don't know - it depends on whether the judge (or panel thereof) would be the right ones to ask.