However, I don't think we are missing the forest for the trees. We need to worry about every tree, and the entire forest.
Al Qaeda, unlike the previous Islamic terrorists, seeks to destroy our country as a force in the world, and ultimately to convert it to an extreme form of Islam - by force. So does Iran, after they have destroyed Israel and recovered from the nuclear counterstrike.
The Islamofascists have claimed a special dispensation from Allah to kill up to 4,000,000 to do it. And of course, if that doesn't do the job, I'm sure they can get the quota raised. Furthermore, Al Qaeda has sought, and is continuing to seek, weapons of mass destruction - things actually made for that - in order to do so.
Yes, they may use low tech attacks against us, although those tend to have less of a combat multiplier. They could blow up a bunch of school buses and really piss us off, but pissing us off and scaring us is not their goal (unlike the Palestinian terrorists of the past). Their goal is to really hurt us very badly. And to do that, they need to make attacks that are very deadly.
The simplest one of those, I would think, is downing a bunch of airliners with either bombs in cargo, or MANPADs. That would have substantial economic consequences. But it would also piss us off a whole bunch and not really hurt us more than 9-11 did. Furthermore, they tried this in the mid 90's ( Bojinka ) and were only stopped by accident.
Just to maintain their street cred in the terrorist world, they have to top 9-11. The easiest way to do that, if they can get hold of it, is to use a WMD - preferably a nuke.
A small, simple ( gun design enriched U-235 ) device would kill a very large number of people - primarily from fallout from the ground burst (especially since it would require a lot of U235 that would turn into fallout instead of fission energy). These weapons are so easy to design that almost anyone with a bit of a science background, a bit of engineering, and access to a machine shop could build it. The US used one in WW-II and never even tested it first. The only hard part is getting enough U-235, and guess who keeps announcing that they are going to make a whole bunch of that - starting today (or was it yesterday?). It's that beacon of sanity, Iran. You know, the country whose president talks of his green halo that strikes dumb UN ambassadors when he speaks? Who denies the holocaust and has said that he will destroy Israel? The guy whose bosses have said that they can stand nuclear retaliation if the result is worthwhile - even if it takes out a whole bunch of Muslims? The country which has long been the most significant sponsor of terrorism in the world (can you say Hezbollah and their chemical armed missiles?)?.
Yeah, those guys are just one of the threats to make Al Qaeda (a loose term anyway) a whole lot more dangerous.
Or perhaps we should consider the Al Qaeda linked cell which was picked up in London. Those dudes were working on Ricin, a very nasty (if not that toxic by CW scales) poison. They probably learned how to do that from Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda guy who lived in Iraq under Saddam and who is now cooperating with the Baathists in killing Iraqis and Americans. He too was make Ricin weapons, and also tried to set off a large (of rather odd) chemical WMD attack in Jordan last year.
Or we can look at how easy it is to genetically alter bacteria and viruses to make them into really nasty bioweapons - contagious and deadly. The rate of improvement in genetic engineering (measured in cost per base pair synthesized or decoded) is faster than Moore's law (my daughter used to do this stuff for a living and may be doing it again shortly). If you want to get really nervous, and know a bit about bacteriology, google up "mousepox" and "interleukin," and then remember that Islamofascists, unlike other enemies we have had, really don't care if they turn loose something that takes out 90% of the world's population. Also easy
Oh, I expect foolish free citizens to do their best to defeat a government agency which has as its purpose protection of the United States from terrorists.
It does amaze me how quickly Americans have concluded that the terrorist threat is minor. Al Qaeda is very smart to launch their attacks elsewhere now and wait until they have something really nasty, like a nuke, before they attack us again. They didn't anticipate the ferocity of our first response. But they do study history, and know that the decadent west cannot fight a protracted war unless the citizens are scared frequently in their daily life. So they will wait. They saw how both Democrat and Republican administrations were too weak to respond to their overseas atrocities to our citizens (Carter - Iranian embassy takeover, Reagan -Marine barracks bombing, Clinto - first WTC attack, Mogadishu, USS Cole).
And when they do attack, those who have done their best to stop the government's attempts to provide security will look worse than stupid.
In the late thirties, there were those who didn't fear the Nazis, in both Britain and the US. So we entered that war with virtually no military (other than a badly decimated Navy). Only the existence of the oceans prevented us from suffering grievous damage to our civilian population as a result.
So go ahead and stick your head in the sand. Hey, those terrorists aren't going to hurt you. Heck, just because they claim a God given right to kill 4,000,000 innocents doesn't mean they are actually going to do it. Just because it is likely that more truly rogue states will get more an more nukes (I assume you just love the current government of Iran and are willing to trust your safety to their sanity) doesn't mean we should worry about one of those nukes being carried by an (untraceable) terrorist and set off in a major US city. Just because the same organization that killed 3000 Americans (and others) in one attack in New York City repeatedly claims that they will do worse next time is no reason to try to prevent them - certainly not if it requires that we let the government scan our boring and irrelevant conversations in their search for the real bad guys, right?
Heck, we know (from zillions of Slashdot posts) that terrorism is really a minor threat, and the big threat is our Bushitler run government, right?
Sigh.
As to crypto, it is true that the NSA cannot put the genie back into the bottle. The good news is that counter-intelligence people know that their enemy often makes stupid mistakes (such as the re-distribution of one timoe pads by the KGB - Venona - nsa.gov ), and doesn't always use crypto. Furthermore, the NSA is smart enough to keep their cryptoanalasys capabilities secret (at least until some traitor spills the beans to the New York Times, which will happily print it - causing even further damage than recent leaks).
But just as I correctly anticipated a very damaging terrorist attack prior to 9-11 (the date and method were the surprise, not the general location nor the casualty count), I'm sure that some terrorist group, almost certainly an Islamofascist one, will do their very best to do a whole lot worse than 9-11 next time. And they will probably succeed. Just as 9-11 would very likely have been stopped if it wasn't for *overly restrictive* civil liberties barriers (I am not, obviously calling for an end to civil liberties), the more barriers we put in the NSA's way, the more likely they will succeed in something much worse next time.
Someday, Americans will wake up and realize that one has to *balance* civil liberties with defense. The founders of the country knew that, which is why the both created a Bill of Rights (which comes nowhere near, btw, prohibiting the current NSA monitoring) and a strong executive. Having just fought a war, they knew full well that you can't have both a fully libertarian country and a country that survives.
Let's see what happens to civil libertarian concerns after Hamas blows up a few school buses around the count
Real security involves multiple layers and not the attempt to make a perfect firewall at one point.
Airport screens are pretty unlikely to catch someone with a biological weapon such as anthrax spores or even better, botulinum toxin, because an effective weapon can be small and carried in all sorts of legitimate containers. Chemical weapons of enough toxicity and quantity to kill a lot of people at the Super Bowl (such as the binary nerve gas found in Iraq after the invasion ) is likewise easy to smuggle in.
The biggest problem is what to do if the network does detect something. A quick evacuation of the stadium is going to cause mayhem, and you wouldn't want to do this with a false positive.
I suspect that this use of the system is to see what it does with a large number of people in the sensor network, giving off all sorts of chemicals and biologicals (mandatory bad taste joke inserted here).
They are not targetting millions of people. They are doing traffic analysis on millions of people, and perhaps using word recognition on unencrypted traffic.
So if I were a terrorist, I would use encryption and draw attention to my traffic, leading to further analysis.
And if I were an ordinary citizen, I would not normally use encryption (except perhaps for commercial secrets which I don't want *foreign* agencies grabbing) because I don't want to make the legitimate job of tracking terrorists harder. Unlike many, simply do not fear the NSA scanning my traffic for keywords, maybe looking a bit harder on a call or two, and then ignoring me because I'm not a threat. I do, on the other hand, fear international modern terrorism, because their attacks can kill a whole lot of people, and that is very, very bad. Furthermore, from the selfish side, they might hit someone I love, or much more likely, do serious damage to the economy.
I find it sad that the first post rated "Informative" is almost all political.
Can't we look at this technology without the technology government bashing and utopian (and ignorant) libertarian rants?
SDR is not a new technology, but it is rapidly becoming a good way to do things, as the hardware (digital and analog) to enable it is being designed and built.
Cell phone companies are (or will soon be) using SDR to much more efficiently handle their multichannel cell sites. Instead of having a radio per conversation, or a radio per channel, they can have one or a few radios containing very high speed DSP SDR code. This saves cost and has the obvious flexibility of field upgradeability.
GNU ( http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/doc/exploring -gnuradio.html#software ) has had an SDR project going for quite a while (I do wish they would do APCO P-25 reception, since I don't have the time). Hams have been doing various forms of SDR also - for example, the very narrowband systems that use a PC to do the DSP for HF data communications.
Contrary to what some might think, SDR doesn't give magical powers to radios - the ability to operate on all frequencies at once. Radios have hardware filters in them for reasons that cannot be solved in software: to compensate for the non-linearities in the analog (or digital) software - which especially causes problems in high dynamic range situations. Radios may have to separate signals that differ in power by factors of 10^12 or more, which are relatively close in frequencies. Transmitters have to avoid emitting spurious signals at similar ratios to their output power.
More specifically, if you put two signals (assume sine waves for now) into a non-linear device, it is the equivalent of putting those time-domain functions into a polynomial of degree 2 or more. This means that those sine waves will be multiplied by each other and themselves (and a coefficient which you try to make as small as possible). The result is output at the sum and difference frequencies and the harmonics of the original signals. Non-linearity can crop up in surprising ways. The most common one seen in radio is receive and transmit amplifiers, which are *always* non-linear. In addition, parasitic devices (such as two wires touching each other somewhere nearby) can act as non-linear mixers, generating spurious signals. Anyone who has worked on systems at crowded radio sites knows the fun of tracking down "intermod" signals (which are the result of this process). SDR's do nothing to improve this situation. On the contrary, they may require wider bandwidth amplifiers, which increases the odds of spurious signals. Furthermore, the very process of sampling with non-infinite bit-width A/D's and D/A's is itself a non-linear process that generates mixing.
So SDR still has to deal with the issues at the antenna that analog radios deal with.
Where it gets cool is at the baseband - in other words, at the modulation=baseband level (or in the case of multi-channel receivers/transmitters, at an intermediate level). This is where you take the information you want to send/receive, and convert it into/from the RF representation of that information. A simple example is FM modulation (used in most older land mobile radios - police, fire, cell phones, ham repeaters, etc, and in TV and FM radio broadcast). Here the SDR will take the modulation (voice or music or whatever), and use it to generate the signal equivalent to having it quickly alter the frequency of a carrier wave. Depending on the system, it may literally output a sine wave modulated this way. In other systems, it may generate some intermediate representation that then goes to the radio.
But a far more interesting system might be a trunked narrow-band digital public service radio system (which US public safety organizations are converting to at FCC insistence). These systems are designed for improved flexibility (
The only thing true about your first paragraph is the wisdom of the founders. They also called for a strong executive, specifically for circumstances involving war.
Your second assertion is also not true, or if it is, you cannot prove it. I could construct a large number of scenarios that Al Qaeda cells could use to kill large numbers of us - even if they don't get hold of nukes (which they will one of these days).
Re 9-11, the more people they sent in for a single attack, the more likely they were to be caught and the entire enterprise stopped. It is only because of the incompetence of parts of our government, and certain dangerous barriers to information gathering or transmission (such as the FBI firewall between counterintelligence and criminal investigation) that they didn't get caught the first time. They were lucky. And since they are willing to use suicidal attackers, they can afford to be unlucky (as they hve been in several other attacks that were thwarted).
Project Bojinka was going to bring down a dozen airliners on the same day. It was only thwarted because the bomb lab had a fire. That was an Al Qaeda operation *before* 9-11. Do we count on such luck forever?
The important fact that you miss is that, specifically due to modern technology, a few people, with either no state sponsorship or well hidden sponsorship, can do a whole lot of damage. They did so on 9-11. They have demonstrated that they still have that capacity in Bali, Madrid, London, Breslan and a number of other places. It is only a matter of time before they get greater force multipliers (the 767's proved to be quite good in that regard).
Al Qaeda has attempted to use chemical weapons (London), has expressed an interest in biological weapons (which can be much more deadly and are a lot easier to get/create than most people think), and has a desire for nuclear weapons (which they don't have the ability to create but might have the money to buy).
Furthermore, the number of people trained in terrorism by Al Qaeda while they were in Pakistan is in the many tens of thousands. Many of these people remain assets.
Al Qaeda is patient. They can wait because their mission is an eternal religious cause. They may very well be waiting for us to cripple out counter-terrorism measures through a combination of internal opposition and the normal lack of attention that comes after awhile. Just remember how people felt and thought on 9-11 and for a while afterwards. The threat hasn't gotten smaller (although the occupation of Afghanistan and the world-wide hunt (fairly successful) for Al Qaeda leadership has disrupted them at least temporarily. But all we have bought is time. They will be back. Any day, and somewhere we don't expect them.
For example... what if they use a few SA-14's to shoot down a few airliners at different airports around the country - let's say one a day for a week. What damage do you think that would reek? Do you doubt they can get the weapons and smuggle them into the US? Do you have any idea how to stop them?
The best way (and it ain't perfect) is to tighten our security as much as we can.
FINALLY, just think about what the American people will demand if bad attacks happen. Do you think they will agree with civil libertarians? I think it is better to keep credibility by NOT fighting against reasonable measures (such as the NSA program) so that when the people want to enact really strong measures, somebody will be around who can at least point out the dangers.
The US does not require a constitutional declaration of war to be in a state of war. That is a fiction. It is true that the Constitution allows only the Congress to 'declare' war. Care to tell me what that really means? Nobody declares war any more. They just do it.
When your country is attacked by a foreign enemy, and many are killed on your homeleand, you are, by default, in a state of war. Would you argue that the president would not have the authority to shoot down a sudden incoming ICBM before he consulted with congress?
3) There is much less expectation of privacy on an international call. To start with, you can expect that intelligence agencies of foreign governments, who do not have our privacy fetish (or ignore it), will be listening. So forget the privacy expectation. I suppose somebody very ignorant might have such an expection, but that's irrelevant.
4) No, we are not talking about the mass searching of everyday domestic phone calls (or if we are, please give me a reference). The fact that the press has chosen to call this activity "domestic surveillance" does not mean that it actually is. It has repeatedly been stated that the NSA is monitoring international calls with a specific target or terrorism specific calls - primarily those that go to already known terrorist numbers overseas.
5) Prove that this has been done, please. I would be interested in knowing if that is actually true. And I am not talking about statistical analysis (which the government does all the time, often with far more sensitive information such as medical data) - I don't mind if they do statistical analysis where there is no specific monitoring of individuals.
It is dreary to hear this sort of stuff. Critical thinking would lead you to seeking evidence of either the truth or falsity of what I said. You didn't do that. You just asserted that I was lying.
Are you aware of the connections that are now known? Were you aware of the (fewer) connections that were known before we invaded Iraq, including the trips Zarqawi made to Baghdad during the Saddam regime? The involvement of an Iraqi diplomat with the meeting in Malaysia during which 9-11 was planned (and no, I don't assert he was actually in the meeting)? How about the since recovered Iraqi intelligence documents showing their official designation of Bin Laden as an intelligent asset (do you know what the term means), and many other various documents in the "take" from Baghdad?
OF COURSE they had ties. It is ludicrous to believe that they didn't, in fact. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" applies very well in the Middle East.
It is true that many in the CIA claimed that the "secular" Iraqi regime would never work with the fanatically religious Al Qaeda, but that was a dumb finding, so typical of CIA analysts. After all, Zarqawi today is working closely with former members of that regime. Furthermore, the fanatically religious Iranian regime is working closely with the fanatically anti-religious North Koreans. Duh.
Notice that I didn't use that fact to justify the war, btw.
I don't keep my sources in my pocket. I would suggest you check a recent issue of The Weekly Standard for details. There was an article in the last week or two by someone who used to have to get FISA warrants, and it details the actual, not theoretical, process that is involved.
Oh, and I have always considered it likely that the other side will gain the presidency. In this regard, my main concern is that, like under Clinton the First, they will put too many obstacles in the way of surveillance, or they will fail to appreciate the gravity of the threat from our enemies.
Regarding whether surveillance would have prevented 9-11, the answer depends on how competent the people who got the information were. Remember that procedural barriers designed to "protect civil liberties" absolutely prevented reading Zacarias Moussaoui's hard drive (according to http://www.courttv.com/trials/moussaoui/background.html , it was a FISA court that did so). Read the article I just mentioned and notice the other clues that could have been obtained.
Furthermore, if you knew anything about war fighting (or counterintelligence), you would understand that there are no absolutes. You fight with what you have, and you erect what barriers you can against the enemy. To expect those barriers to be perfect is utter folly. Likewise, to argue that since they aren't perfect, we shouldn't erect them is silly. Those barriers have to be consistent with the level of threat and the cost (including the cost to civil liberties). I am simply weighing those costs differently. I recognize that privacy has always been violated by our government, and there are really very few instances of abuse - especially of people who really were innocent. Just as war cannot be fought without casualties, surveillance measures cannot be erected without mistakes and perhaps some level of abuse. That is simply not an excuse to not do so.
As for your utterly unsupported assertion that the NSA and CIA are only competent at domestic surveillance, all I can say is: you have really got to be kidding. The CIA is certainly not the most competent organization, although we don't really know about the NSA (and we really *shouldn't* know).
Yes, surveillance could have prevented 9-11, and probably would have. It *might* have gotten enough information to show the depth of the plot, and it was clear just from the Moussaoui arrest that the target was commercial aircraft. There are a number of informational threds tying him to others involved in the plot.
As for the big brother stuff, I don't particularly like the idea of Big Brother listening in on my calls, but then I don't have regular chats with foreign Al Qaeda agents! And that is what this program was targetted at.
Furthermore, don't forget that Congress was overseeing this activity from the time it started.
And yes, I think we will eventually discover, at the cost of many lives, that we do indeed have too many of certain civil liberties - specifically privacy, to adequately defend ourselves in a war we did not declare.
Let me ask you: do you truly believe that Al Qaeda and friends, and the state sponsors who cooperate with them, are not planning on causing grievous damage to America, causing much death and economic damage? Do you really want us to avoid what are reasonable (and long established) measures to attempt to stop them?
Or are you one of those who seems to believe that our privacy rights are so gosh darned important that we should simply let the terrorists do whatever they want once they get into our country?
In other words, do you think we are at war or not?
Just as happened with the Vietnam War, our enemies are counting on many people in the US to weaken us. It worked for the North Vietnamese, and it may very well work for Al Qaeda (not to mention nuclear Iran, etc).
Attempting to have some degree of balance between civil liberties absolutism, and a total
Unfortunately, too many people are utterly paranoid about government actions that have nothing to do with suppressing dissent or otherwise persecuting our people, and everything to do with trying to stop a terrorist from, say, setting off a nuke in downtown Mountain View.
As a conservative, I don't trust the government to do things very well. But I know that we need them to do some things that involve collective security - otherwise we could just disband them and have anarchy.
We didn't choose this enemy - they chose us. And their tactics and declared intent involves the use of agents within our borders. To not be able to intercept their international communications because of some paranoia is idiotic. A democratic government which cannot defend its citizens will not survive.
Get a clue: these people want to kill lots of us (they have a dispensation from Allah to kill 4,000,000 innocents). To do so, they need agents in the US. To stop them, we need to detect those agents.
Anyone criticizing the interceptino of international communications should, for intellectual honesty, at least tell us how *they* plan to deal with this threat. Otherwise its just juvenile bloviating.
What is this "domestic" wiretaps nonsense? Since the media has been spinning these wiretaps on *international* calls as "domestic," I guess you, like many others, fell for it.
In fact, these are intercepts of communications crossing our international borders. Hardly the same as tapping your phone call to your girl friend or whatever. These international taps have *always* been legal and have been used for a very, very long time.
As for wanting to be secret, are you not aware that members of congress, from both parties, were briefed regularly on this program? THAT is accountability. But if you have ever worked with secrets, you know that you want to minimize the number of people who are know them. And going to the FISA courts, which requires the involvement of many people for the complicated warrant process, not to mention the staff of those courts, greatly increasess the probability of a leak.
Such leaks are quite damaging, as they reveal to the enemy the existence of the program, and to some extent, the power of the program. Given that this program has already prevented one Al Qaeda attack, the argument that the enemy already knew and took countermeasures doesn't work. But now they *really know*, thanks to irresponsible and illegal leakers of extremely sensitive information, and the highly irresponsible media.
Actually, FISA warrants are very hard to prepare, and require a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy, and the involvement of many people. The slowness of FISA is one reason that some critical information about 9-11, pre-9-11, was not acquired soon enough to prevent the attacks. Other reasons were similar civil liberties fetishism which paralyzed the FBI - preventing counterintelligence from communicating with criminal investigations, thwarting a different path to preventing 9-11.
Without the *excess* civil liberties restrictions (as opposed to truly necessary ones), there is a very good chance that 9-11 would have been prevented. The "firewall" within the FBI between counterintelligence and criminal investigations was one of those, and ironically was raised higher in a policy written by a lawyer who later served as a member of hte 9-11 commission.
1) The president has wartime powers which include surveillance of suspected enemies. The recognition of a state of war and authorization to take wartime actions was declared by Congress after 9/11, but constitutionally this declaration was not even required.
2) The constitutionality of the FISA courts has not been tested. There is good reason to believe that, in the case of war powers or international communications, the FISA restrictions violate the separation of powers, giving cocnstitutional presidential powers to the courts.
3) There is no expectation of privacy for international communications. FISA requires an expectation of privacy.
4) The executive has the power to "search" international communications in the same way that it has the power to inspect packages crossing the border.
5) All modern presidents have used these powers. Only the current president, who actually has a dangerous war to fight, is plagued by people leaking highly classified information about them - people who should go to jail for a very long time, as this information aids terrorists - i.e. our enemies. It is interesting that the anti-Bush press made such a big deal about the leak of Valerie Plame's identity, which probably had zero impact on natinal security, but is keeping quiet about the import of this newer leak (and the other very damaging leak about CIA prisons in foreign countries) and is not reporting about the NSA requested criminal investigation into this latest link.
In addition to these legalisms, it is pretty clear that you can't wage a war if you don't even surveil communications crossing your borders to suspected enemy agents!
Furthermore, the mere act of gathering large amounts of customer data does not mean that each customer was surveilled. It depends on how the data was used. Since the NSA has little interest in surveiling ordinary citizens (and no resources to do so), the fears of these actions are dramatically overblown.
The EFF, in its role of civil liberties extremist, is showing its lack of cocnsideration for our national security, or its failure to understand the nature of the threat we face. In other words, they are acting like irresponsible children - not for the first time.
So federal employees don't have free speech rights?
I have seen plenty of people who probably weren't federal employees do nasty things to Wiki, which were effectively censorship. Now its a federal employee. Sigh.
Censorship is when the government uses the law to prevent certain speech. An example is the stupid McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform" law.
It is not when someone, federal employee or not, abuses a system like Wiki.
The UK and the US (and much of the rest of the west) have had dramatic cultural declines over the last 30 years. In the UK it has been most dramatic in the last 15 or so. The result is decadent value sets in which many people (and this flows down to their kids) simply do not value work. The media culture is especially bad. The depradations of the looney academicians in the "education" and man liberal arts have made it worse, loosing notions and nostrums that ignore the lessions and values of centuries and replace them with faddish educational theories and crazy philosophical notions (multiculturalism, relativism, etc). The social welfare state produces children who have grown up in a subculture where work is sumply the dumb thing to do, as is any other responsible behavior.
If you don't value work (or at least understand the need to do some unpleasant things), you aren't going to exercise the parts of your brain that do math and science (unless you are a geek - we go for that stuff anyway).
This is at least one factor in the decline of abilities in the areas of math and science... math and science are hard subjects - and they require (heaven forbid) memorization and (in early math) rote learning - methodologies thoroughly destroyed by the idiots with high level degrees in education.
Who knows what other influences do - for example, videogames apparently improve abilities of young males when they are used as military combatants (a necessary but hopefully not widespread occupation). But they may degrade their abilities for math and science thinking - if nothing else than by chewing up time that might be spent in those areas.
If you want to understand what happens to the youth on the lower side of the socioeconomic scale in Britain, just read a few articles by "Theodore Dalrymple."
So much for a democratic process! It would appear that the powers, who have no greater claim to the truth than, for example, a politico, are exerting far greater influence.
Reminds me of utopian communism, where it always turns out that the people pushing it are more equal, somehow, than everyone else.
Going back and forth is not likely to end up at a "neutral" point of view. I've seen enough Wiki articles to know that.
What it is likely to end up with is a weighted average. But if A is a fact, and more people believe in or are willing to fight for not-A, you are going to end up with not-A, which is not neutral, but just wrong.
In spite of what some academicians say, there are in fact truths, which are independent of point of view. However, in anything complex, the interpretation and shading of those truths, if they appear at all, is going to be a result of the Wiki process, which bears little resemblance to truth seeking methodologicies such as science. Science is not determined by vote or determination - at least in the long run. It is determined by truth testing, and that can reveal that the vast majority are simply wrong.
The Wiki process, because it deals with many issues outside of the realm of science, simply is incapable of that level of accuracy or neutrality.
"left wing" and "progessive" in the American political lexicon are pretty close to synonymous. Certainly "progressive" IS "left" however else you may want to characterize it. Getting upset about that characterization is pretty bizarre.
Oh, and there is lots of evidence showing links between the Saddam's government and Al Qaeda. You may choose not to believe them (it's called "confirmation bias") but it certainly is not a silly or incorrect thing for people who *do* believe them to put them in! But let's not start a thread about whether my assertion of that is true or not, because few who care enough to post are open minded enough to change their opinion based on whatever anyone says on Slashdot.
Political controversies simply cannot be neatly settled. There are legitimate difference of opinion over what seem to be settled facts. Few situations are simple enough that both sides have the same view.
So if it is political, it will be disuputed. Count on it. And telling us which interpretation is right is rather silly, unless it is about something relatively simple and solidly established in fact. I could give you a zillion examples, but that would start a huge thread of people disaagreeing with me, and name calling, and all sorts of tripe.
Get used to it. People honestly and dishonestly disagree. And some people will use whatever power they have, be it a political staff or an powerful constituency (such as that of the Democratic Underground) to fight it out in a Wiki.
Two years ago I ran into a political mess on Wikipedia (no details here or it will start another useless fight). One side was favored by whoever seemed to have the most veto power on the page. It wasn't my side.
I didn't have the time to fight, so that entry, which was of significant import at the time, is simply riddled with holes and full of hagiographic propaganda for the person (presidential candidate) whom it describes. It is still that way.
Wiki is a fine idea, but the more important it gets, the more it will be abused.
The sad thing is that I am seeing the same sort of thing on Snopes, although it is not open to public manipulation. I sent in a correction on an item which was judged "false" even though it never referenced the actual source (and the sources were well known). The answer I got back from their *automated* mailer was that I didn't understand enough the subject.
An automated mailer figured this out? I knew first hand the people involved, and a Snopes robot tells me I don't understand the subject? And snopes judges the information a lie when they clearly don't know the people first hand? And they don't even reference the book published by the people I know which addresses the subject in great detail, although they reference three other books from the other side of the issue?
If you really believe that slightly reducing anonymity "destroys us," then you are indeed an extremist.
And you are right, you do live in a fantasy land.
Sorry dude, but I wouldn't want you voting on security mesaures, because you would have absolutely none.
The founders of the United States clearly understood that there was a tradeoff between complete freedom and necessary security. Even strong libertarians recognize this... otherwise they would be anarchists!
So get a clue... you have never been completely free or completely anonymous. Some of your taxes go to protecting you. And you have no choice whatsoever about it. That's a freedom already gone. Every time you go out in public, you are subject to scrutiny by, among others, government agents such as policemen.
Absolutists are fools, whether they are communists, fascists or civil libertarians.
Sloppy thinking, IMHO. I have also worked in computer security and military security.
It seems trivially obvious that some things need to be kept secret. For example, if one is relying on a profiling system to identify possibly dangerous individuals, revealing the profiling criteria defeats the entire purpose - the malefactors will then know how to avoid being profiled.
If I had time, I could cite many other similar examples.
Just because civilian cryptographers (but not those at NSA) believe that everything about a cipher should be known for it to be secure (and thare are good reasons for both their and NSA views, depending on circumstances), it doesn't mean that every security measure that has secrets associated with it is dumb.
It is absolutely normal for people to be denied standing. If Gilmore was refused travel because he refused to show ID, then the CAPPS policies, etc, are irrelevant, because they did not come into effect. Had he been singled out by the lists, he would then have grounds to challenge them. I am normally singled out that way because my name is very common. I accept that as a price I pay as a citizen to slightly reduce the odds of another 9-11 (yes, I said slightly). Many Americans paid a vastly higher price to protect our nation from different enemies in different times. I voluntarily surrendered my civil liberties for a couple of years during the Vietnam War, which included visiting a scenic, tropical southeast asian country.
It is absolutely necessary for some procedures which affect US citizens to be secret. If they are to be effective, they must not be known to people who whould then circumvent them to cause great harm. This includes the details of the "no fly" lists. Anyone who doesn't recognize this need for secrecy (in cases like this if not this exact one) lives in a fantasy land where the slightest infringement upon civil liberties is more dangerous than the most dangerous of enemies (such as a nuclear armed terrorist). Those who leaked, and those who support the right to leak the information about NEST teams investigating mosques and certain Islamists are the most dangerous of civil liberties fundamentalists.
The fact, cited by some in this argument, that the government still has glaring holes elsewhere in its airline security has long been held by the courts as irrelevant. The government is not *obligated* to do the job of protecting you perfectly (in fact, they aren't obligated at all). They can take some measures without taking all possible measures.
The rules that Gilmore was protesting are *not* secret laws. They are secret procedures involved in enforcing non-secret regulations derived from non-secret laws. If you don't like this, go complain to your congressman. If you accept the need for such lists (and I do), then the need for secrecy in their contents and methodology is bloody obvious.
The EFF is a member of the Civil LIberties Fundamentalist church. As such, it routinely pushes as hard as it can for absolute civil liberties. In the real world, absolute civil liberties are impossible. IF a government provided them, it would immediatley cease to exist, to then be replaced by one that didn't. So civil liberties fundies are just wrong, in the ultimate extension of their goals.
But of course, my argument is a slippery slope argument, that civil liberties fundies often make. Which brings up another point: discussions of items of principle, which involve cases of specifics involved by a court, always end up with slippery slope arguments. Slippery slope arguments are simply lazy thinking, and the Supreme Court (of which I am not a great fan right now) routinely has to deal with putting boundaries along the slope, proving that it is not, in fact, slippery.
I was on a business trip, and on the island of Guam, had my wallet, passport and all identifying documents stolen. Because of the way the flights work, at least then, when you flew from Guam to Hawaii you had to not only have ID, but go through US immigration and customs.
I not only had no trouble getting on the flight, but no trouble entering the US. I suspect today it might be a little harder, but any rule like this will have (or will eventually get) ways to deal with this situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it's a bit hyperbolic, but it makes a point
However, I don't think we are missing the forest for the trees. We need to worry about every tree, and the entire forest.
Al Qaeda, unlike the previous Islamic terrorists, seeks to destroy our country as a force in the world, and ultimately to convert it to an extreme form of Islam - by force. So does Iran, after they have destroyed Israel and recovered from the nuclear counterstrike.
The Islamofascists have claimed a special dispensation from Allah to kill up to 4,000,000 to do it. And of course, if that doesn't do the job, I'm sure they can get the quota raised. Furthermore, Al Qaeda has sought, and is continuing to seek, weapons of mass destruction - things actually made for that - in order to do so.
Yes, they may use low tech attacks against us, although those tend to have less of a combat multiplier. They could blow up a bunch of school buses and really piss us off, but pissing us off and scaring us is not their goal (unlike the Palestinian terrorists of the past). Their goal is to really hurt us very badly. And to do that, they need to make attacks that are very deadly.
The simplest one of those, I would think, is downing a bunch of airliners with either bombs in cargo, or MANPADs. That would have substantial economic consequences. But it would also piss us off a whole bunch and not really hurt us more than 9-11 did. Furthermore, they tried this in the mid 90's ( Bojinka ) and were only stopped by accident.
Just to maintain their street cred in the terrorist world, they have to top 9-11. The easiest way to do that, if they can get hold of it, is to use a WMD - preferably a nuke.
A small, simple ( gun design enriched U-235 ) device would kill a very large number of people - primarily from fallout from the ground burst (especially since it would require a lot of U235 that would turn into fallout instead of fission energy). These weapons are so easy to design that almost anyone with a bit of a science background, a bit of engineering, and access to a machine shop could build it. The US used one in WW-II and never even tested it first. The only hard part is getting enough U-235, and guess who keeps announcing that they are going to make a whole bunch of that - starting today (or was it yesterday?). It's that beacon of sanity, Iran. You know, the country whose president talks of his green halo that strikes dumb UN ambassadors when he speaks? Who denies the holocaust and has said that he will destroy Israel? The guy whose bosses have said that they can stand nuclear retaliation if the result is worthwhile - even if it takes out a whole bunch of Muslims? The country which has long been the most significant sponsor of terrorism in the world (can you say Hezbollah and their chemical armed missiles?)?.
Yeah, those guys are just one of the threats to make Al Qaeda (a loose term anyway) a whole lot more dangerous.
Or perhaps we should consider the Al Qaeda linked cell which was picked up in London. Those dudes were working on Ricin, a very nasty (if not that toxic by CW scales) poison. They probably learned how to do that from Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda guy who lived in Iraq under Saddam and who is now cooperating with the Baathists in killing Iraqis and Americans. He too was make Ricin weapons, and also tried to set off a large (of rather odd) chemical WMD attack in Jordan last year.
Or we can look at how easy it is to genetically alter bacteria and viruses to make them into really nasty bioweapons - contagious and deadly. The rate of improvement in genetic engineering (measured in cost per base pair synthesized or decoded) is faster than Moore's law (my daughter used to do this stuff for a living and may be doing it again shortly). If you want to get really nervous, and know a bit about bacteriology, google up "mousepox" and "interleukin," and then remember that Islamofascists, unlike other enemies we have had, really don't care if they turn loose something that takes out 90% of the world's population. Also easy
Oh, I expect foolish free citizens to do their best to defeat a government agency which has as its purpose protection of the United States from terrorists.
It does amaze me how quickly Americans have concluded that the terrorist threat is minor. Al Qaeda is very smart to launch their attacks elsewhere now and wait until they have something really nasty, like a nuke, before they attack us again. They didn't anticipate the ferocity of our first response. But they do study history, and know that the decadent west cannot fight a protracted war unless the citizens are scared frequently in their daily life. So they will wait. They saw how both Democrat and Republican administrations were too weak to respond to their overseas atrocities to our citizens (Carter - Iranian embassy takeover, Reagan -Marine barracks bombing, Clinto - first WTC attack, Mogadishu, USS Cole).
And when they do attack, those who have done their best to stop the government's attempts to provide security will look worse than stupid.
In the late thirties, there were those who didn't fear the Nazis, in both Britain and the US. So we entered that war with virtually no military (other than a badly decimated Navy). Only the existence of the oceans prevented us from suffering grievous damage to our civilian population as a result.
So go ahead and stick your head in the sand. Hey, those terrorists aren't going to hurt you. Heck, just because they claim a God given right to kill 4,000,000 innocents doesn't mean they are actually going to do it. Just because it is likely that more truly rogue states will get more an more nukes (I assume you just love the current government of Iran and are willing to trust your safety to their sanity) doesn't mean we should worry about one of those nukes being carried by an (untraceable) terrorist and set off in a major US city. Just because the same organization that killed 3000 Americans (and others) in one attack in New York City repeatedly claims that they will do worse next time is no reason to try to prevent them - certainly not if it requires that we let the government scan our boring and irrelevant conversations in their search for the real bad guys, right?
Heck, we know (from zillions of Slashdot posts) that terrorism is really a minor threat, and the big threat is our Bushitler run government, right?
Sigh.
As to crypto, it is true that the NSA cannot put the genie back into the bottle. The good news is that counter-intelligence people know that their enemy often makes stupid mistakes (such as the re-distribution of one timoe pads by the KGB - Venona - nsa.gov ), and doesn't always use crypto. Furthermore, the NSA is smart enough to keep their cryptoanalasys capabilities secret (at least until some traitor spills the beans to the New York Times, which will happily print it - causing even further damage than recent leaks).
But just as I correctly anticipated a very damaging terrorist attack prior to 9-11 (the date and method were the surprise, not the general location nor the casualty count), I'm sure that some terrorist group, almost certainly an Islamofascist one, will do their very best to do a whole lot worse than 9-11 next time. And they will probably succeed. Just as 9-11 would very likely have been stopped if it wasn't for *overly restrictive* civil liberties barriers (I am not, obviously calling for an end to civil liberties), the more barriers we put in the NSA's way, the more likely they will succeed in something much worse next time.
Someday, Americans will wake up and realize that one has to *balance* civil liberties with defense. The founders of the country knew that, which is why the both created a Bill of Rights (which comes nowhere near, btw, prohibiting the current NSA monitoring) and a strong executive. Having just fought a war, they knew full well that you can't have both a fully libertarian country and a country that survives.
Let's see what happens to civil libertarian concerns after Hamas blows up a few school buses around the count
Real security involves multiple layers and not the attempt to make a perfect firewall at one point.
Airport screens are pretty unlikely to catch someone with a biological weapon such as anthrax spores or even better, botulinum toxin, because an effective weapon can be small and carried in all sorts of legitimate containers. Chemical weapons of enough toxicity and quantity to kill a lot of people at the Super Bowl (such as the binary nerve gas found in Iraq after the invasion ) is likewise easy to smuggle in.
The biggest problem is what to do if the network does detect something. A quick evacuation of the stadium is going to cause mayhem, and you wouldn't want to do this with a false positive.
I suspect that this use of the system is to see what it does with a large number of people in the sensor network, giving off all sorts of chemicals and biologicals (mandatory bad taste joke inserted here).
The second world trade center attack (9-11) was carried out with weapons of mass destruction having a total yield of at least a quarter of a kiloton.
They were *acquired* with boxcutters, a technique which won't work the next time.
They are not targetting millions of people. They are doing traffic analysis on millions of people, and perhaps using word recognition on unencrypted traffic.
So if I were a terrorist, I would use encryption and draw attention to my traffic, leading to further analysis.
And if I were an ordinary citizen, I would not normally use encryption (except perhaps for commercial secrets which I don't want *foreign* agencies grabbing) because I don't want to make the legitimate job of tracking terrorists harder. Unlike many, simply do not fear the NSA scanning my traffic for keywords, maybe looking a bit harder on a call or two, and then ignoring me because I'm not a threat. I do, on the other hand, fear international modern terrorism, because their attacks can kill a whole lot of people, and that is very, very bad. Furthermore, from the selfish side, they might hit someone I love, or much more likely, do serious damage to the economy.
It's a whole lot easier to just steal your encryption devices, put in something that will give away the keys, and return it.
Or just put someone hear you when you are talking.
Or look at other information about you to see if you are worth listening to.
Or ask a bunch of folks about you.
Or feed you some information about something nefarious and see if you use encryption to relay it to someone.
It is way too easy to put your faith in high tech cryptography and high tech cryptanalysis, when old fashioned methods work much better.
The Venona project ( http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00039.cfm ) worked because the Soviet organization for producing one time pads duplicated some of them. Oops!
So much for high tech.
I find it sad that the first post rated "Informative" is almost all political.
Can't we look at this technology without the technology government bashing and utopian (and ignorant) libertarian rants?
SDR is not a new technology, but it is rapidly becoming a good way to do things, as the hardware (digital and analog) to enable it is being designed and built.
Cell phone companies are (or will soon be) using SDR to much more efficiently handle their multichannel cell sites. Instead of having a radio per conversation, or a radio per channel, they can have one or a few radios containing very high speed DSP SDR code. This saves cost and has the obvious flexibility of field upgradeability.
GNU ( http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/doc/exploring -gnuradio.html#software ) has had an SDR project going for quite a while (I do wish they would do APCO P-25 reception, since I don't have the time). Hams have been doing various forms of SDR also - for example, the very narrowband systems that use a PC to do the DSP for HF data communications.
Contrary to what some might think, SDR doesn't give magical powers to radios - the ability to operate on all frequencies at once. Radios have hardware filters in them for reasons that cannot be solved in software: to compensate for the non-linearities in the analog (or digital) software - which especially causes problems in high dynamic range situations. Radios may have to separate signals that differ in power by factors of 10^12 or more, which are relatively close in frequencies. Transmitters have to avoid emitting spurious signals at similar ratios to their output power.
More specifically, if you put two signals (assume sine waves for now) into a non-linear device, it is the equivalent of putting those time-domain functions into a polynomial of degree 2 or more. This means that those sine waves will be multiplied by each other and themselves (and a coefficient which you try to make as small as possible). The result is output at the sum and difference frequencies and the harmonics of the original signals. Non-linearity can crop up in surprising ways. The most common one seen in radio is receive and transmit amplifiers, which are *always* non-linear. In addition, parasitic devices (such as two wires touching each other somewhere nearby) can act as non-linear mixers, generating spurious signals. Anyone who has worked on systems at crowded radio sites knows the fun of tracking down "intermod" signals (which are the result of this process). SDR's do nothing to improve this situation. On the contrary, they may require wider bandwidth amplifiers, which increases the odds of spurious signals. Furthermore, the very process of sampling with non-infinite bit-width A/D's and D/A's is itself a non-linear process that generates mixing.
So SDR still has to deal with the issues at the antenna that analog radios deal with.
Where it gets cool is at the baseband - in other words, at the modulation=baseband level (or in the case of multi-channel receivers/transmitters, at an intermediate level). This is where you take the information you want to send/receive, and convert it into/from the RF representation of that information. A simple example is FM modulation (used in most older land mobile radios - police, fire, cell phones, ham repeaters, etc, and in TV and FM radio broadcast). Here the SDR will take the modulation (voice or music or whatever), and use it to generate the signal equivalent to having it quickly alter the frequency of a carrier wave. Depending on the system, it may literally output a sine wave modulated this way. In other systems, it may generate some intermediate representation that then goes to the radio.
But a far more interesting system might be a trunked narrow-band digital public service radio system (which US public safety organizations are converting to at FCC insistence). These systems are designed for improved flexibility (
The only thing true about your first paragraph is the wisdom of the founders. They also called for a strong executive, specifically for circumstances involving war.
Your second assertion is also not true, or if it is, you cannot prove it. I could construct a large number of scenarios that Al Qaeda cells could use to kill large numbers of us - even if they don't get hold of nukes (which they will one of these days).
Re 9-11, the more people they sent in for a single attack, the more likely they were to be caught and the entire enterprise stopped. It is only because of the incompetence of parts of our government, and certain dangerous barriers to information gathering or transmission (such as the FBI firewall between counterintelligence and criminal investigation) that they didn't get caught the first time. They were lucky. And since they are willing to use suicidal attackers, they can afford to be unlucky (as they hve been in several other attacks that were thwarted).
Project Bojinka was going to bring down a dozen airliners on the same day. It was only thwarted because the bomb lab had a fire. That was an Al Qaeda operation *before* 9-11. Do we count on such luck forever?
The important fact that you miss is that, specifically due to modern technology, a few people, with either no state sponsorship or well hidden sponsorship, can do a whole lot of damage. They did so on 9-11. They have demonstrated that they still have that capacity in Bali, Madrid, London, Breslan and a number of other places. It is only a matter of time before they get greater force multipliers (the 767's proved to be quite good in that regard).
Al Qaeda has attempted to use chemical weapons (London), has expressed an interest in biological weapons (which can be much more deadly and are a lot easier to get/create than most people think), and has a desire for nuclear weapons (which they don't have the ability to create but might have the money to buy).
Furthermore, the number of people trained in terrorism by Al Qaeda while they were in Pakistan is in the many tens of thousands. Many of these people remain assets.
Al Qaeda is patient. They can wait because their mission is an eternal religious cause. They may very well be waiting for us to cripple out counter-terrorism measures through a combination of internal opposition and the normal lack of attention that comes after awhile. Just remember how people felt and thought on 9-11 and for a while afterwards. The threat hasn't gotten smaller (although the occupation of Afghanistan and the world-wide hunt (fairly successful) for Al Qaeda leadership has disrupted them at least temporarily. But all we have bought is time. They will be back. Any day, and somewhere we don't expect them.
For example... what if they use a few SA-14's to shoot down a few airliners at different airports around the country - let's say one a day for a week. What damage do you think that would reek? Do you doubt they can get the weapons and smuggle them into the US? Do you have any idea how to stop them?
The best way (and it ain't perfect) is to tighten our security as much as we can.
FINALLY, just think about what the American people will demand if bad attacks happen. Do you think they will agree with civil libertarians? I think it is better to keep credibility by NOT fighting against reasonable measures (such as the NSA program) so that when the people want to enact really strong measures, somebody will be around who can at least point out the dangers.
The US does not require a constitutional declaration of war to be in a state of war. That is a fiction. It is true that the Constitution allows only the Congress to 'declare' war. Care to tell me what that really means? Nobody declares war any more. They just do it.
When your country is attacked by a foreign enemy, and many are killed on your homeleand, you are, by default, in a state of war. Would you argue that the president would not have the authority to shoot down a sudden incoming ICBM before he consulted with congress?
3) There is much less expectation of privacy on an international call. To start with, you can expect that intelligence agencies of foreign governments, who do not have our privacy fetish (or ignore it), will be listening. So forget the privacy expectation. I suppose somebody very ignorant might have such an expection, but that's irrelevant.
4) No, we are not talking about the mass searching of everyday domestic phone calls (or if we are, please give me a reference). The fact that the press has chosen to call this activity "domestic surveillance" does not mean that it actually is. It has repeatedly been stated that the NSA is monitoring international calls with a specific target or terrorism specific calls - primarily those that go to already known terrorist numbers overseas.
5) Prove that this has been done, please. I would be interested in knowing if that is actually true. And I am not talking about statistical analysis (which the government does all the time, often with far more sensitive information such as medical data) - I don't mind if they do statistical analysis where there is no specific monitoring of individuals.
It is dreary to hear this sort of stuff. Critical thinking would lead you to seeking evidence of either the truth or falsity of what I said. You didn't do that. You just asserted that I was lying.
Are you aware of the connections that are now known? Were you aware of the (fewer) connections that were known before we invaded Iraq, including the trips Zarqawi made to Baghdad during the Saddam regime? The involvement of an Iraqi diplomat with the meeting in Malaysia during which 9-11 was planned (and no, I don't assert he was actually in the meeting)? How about the since recovered Iraqi intelligence documents showing their official designation of Bin Laden as an intelligent asset (do you know what the term means), and many other various documents in the "take" from Baghdad?
OF COURSE they had ties. It is ludicrous to believe that they didn't, in fact. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" applies very well in the Middle East.
It is true that many in the CIA claimed that the "secular" Iraqi regime would never work with the fanatically religious Al Qaeda, but that was a dumb finding, so typical of CIA analysts. After all, Zarqawi today is working closely with former members of that regime. Furthermore, the fanatically religious Iranian regime is working closely with the fanatically anti-religious North Koreans. Duh.
Notice that I didn't use that fact to justify the war, btw.
I don't keep my sources in my pocket. I would suggest you check a recent issue of The Weekly Standard for details. There was an article in the last week or two by someone who used to have to get FISA warrants, and it details the actual, not theoretical, process that is involved.
.html , it was a FISA court that did so). Read the article I just mentioned and notice the other clues that could have been obtained.
Oh, and I have always considered it likely that the other side will gain the presidency. In this regard, my main concern is that, like under Clinton the First, they will put too many obstacles in the way of surveillance, or they will fail to appreciate the gravity of the threat from our enemies.
Regarding whether surveillance would have prevented 9-11, the answer depends on how competent the people who got the information were. Remember that procedural barriers designed to "protect civil liberties" absolutely prevented reading Zacarias Moussaoui's hard drive (according to http://www.courttv.com/trials/moussaoui/background
Furthermore, if you knew anything about war fighting (or counterintelligence), you would understand that there are no absolutes. You fight with what you have, and you erect what barriers you can against the enemy. To expect those barriers to be perfect is utter folly. Likewise, to argue that since they aren't perfect, we shouldn't erect them is silly. Those barriers have to be consistent with the level of threat and the cost (including the cost to civil liberties). I am simply weighing those costs differently. I recognize that privacy has always been violated by our government, and there are really very few instances of abuse - especially of people who really were innocent. Just as war cannot be fought without casualties, surveillance measures cannot be erected without mistakes and perhaps some level of abuse. That is simply not an excuse to not do so.
As for your utterly unsupported assertion that the NSA and CIA are only competent at domestic surveillance, all I can say is: you have really got to be kidding. The CIA is certainly not the most competent organization, although we don't really know about the NSA (and we really *shouldn't* know).
Yes, surveillance could have prevented 9-11, and probably would have. It *might* have gotten enough information to show the depth of the plot, and it was clear just from the Moussaoui arrest that the target was commercial aircraft. There are a number of informational threds tying him to others involved in the plot.
As for the big brother stuff, I don't particularly like the idea of Big Brother listening in on my calls, but then I don't have regular chats with foreign Al Qaeda agents! And that is what this program was targetted at.
Furthermore, don't forget that Congress was overseeing this activity from the time it started.
And yes, I think we will eventually discover, at the cost of many lives, that we do indeed have too many of certain civil liberties - specifically privacy, to adequately defend ourselves in a war we did not declare.
Let me ask you: do you truly believe that Al Qaeda and friends, and the state sponsors who cooperate with them, are not planning on causing grievous damage to America, causing much death and economic damage? Do you really want us to avoid what are reasonable (and long established) measures to attempt to stop them?
Or are you one of those who seems to believe that our privacy rights are so gosh darned important that we should simply let the terrorists do whatever they want once they get into our country?
In other words, do you think we are at war or not?
Just as happened with the Vietnam War, our enemies are counting on many people in the US to weaken us. It worked for the North Vietnamese, and it may very well work for Al Qaeda (not to mention nuclear Iran, etc).
Attempting to have some degree of balance between civil liberties absolutism, and a total
Unfortunately, too many people are utterly paranoid about government actions that have nothing to do with suppressing dissent or otherwise persecuting our people, and everything to do with trying to stop a terrorist from, say, setting off a nuke in downtown Mountain View.
As a conservative, I don't trust the government to do things very well. But I know that we need them to do some things that involve collective security - otherwise we could just disband them and have anarchy.
We didn't choose this enemy - they chose us. And their tactics and declared intent involves the use of agents within our borders. To not be able to intercept their international communications because of some paranoia is idiotic. A democratic government which cannot defend its citizens will not survive.
Get a clue: these people want to kill lots of us (they have a dispensation from Allah to kill 4,000,000 innocents). To do so, they need agents in the US. To stop them, we need to detect those agents.
Anyone criticizing the interceptino of international communications should, for intellectual honesty, at least tell us how *they* plan to deal with this threat. Otherwise its just juvenile bloviating.
What is this "domestic" wiretaps nonsense? Since the media has been spinning these wiretaps on *international* calls as "domestic," I guess you, like many others, fell for it.
In fact, these are intercepts of communications crossing our international borders. Hardly the same as tapping your phone call to your girl friend or whatever. These international taps have *always* been legal and have been used for a very, very long time.
As for wanting to be secret, are you not aware that members of congress, from both parties, were briefed regularly on this program? THAT is accountability. But if you have ever worked with secrets, you know that you want to minimize the number of people who are know them. And going to the FISA courts, which requires the involvement of many people for the complicated warrant process, not to mention the staff of those courts, greatly increasess the probability of a leak.
Such leaks are quite damaging, as they reveal to the enemy the existence of the program, and to some extent, the power of the program. Given that this program has already prevented one Al Qaeda attack, the argument that the enemy already knew and took countermeasures doesn't work. But now they *really know*, thanks to irresponsible and illegal leakers of extremely sensitive information, and the highly irresponsible media.
Wonderful.
Actually, FISA warrants are very hard to prepare, and require a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy, and the involvement of many people. The slowness of FISA is one reason that some critical information about 9-11, pre-9-11, was not acquired soon enough to prevent the attacks. Other reasons were similar civil liberties fetishism which paralyzed the FBI - preventing counterintelligence from communicating with criminal investigations, thwarting a different path to preventing 9-11.
Without the *excess* civil liberties restrictions (as opposed to truly necessary ones), there is a very good chance that 9-11 would have been prevented. The "firewall" within the FBI between counterintelligence and criminal investigations was one of those, and ironically was raised higher in a policy written by a lawyer who later served as a member of hte 9-11 commission.
A few problems with this logic:
1) The president has wartime powers which include surveillance of suspected enemies. The recognition of a state of war and authorization to take wartime actions was declared by Congress after 9/11, but constitutionally this declaration was not even required.
2) The constitutionality of the FISA courts has not been tested. There is good reason to believe that, in the case of war powers or international communications, the FISA restrictions violate the separation of powers, giving cocnstitutional presidential powers to the courts.
3) There is no expectation of privacy for international communications. FISA requires an expectation of privacy.
4) The executive has the power to "search" international communications in the same way that it has the power to inspect packages crossing the border.
5) All modern presidents have used these powers. Only the current president, who actually has a dangerous war to fight, is plagued by people leaking highly classified information about them - people who should go to jail for a very long time, as this information aids terrorists - i.e. our enemies. It is interesting that the anti-Bush press made such a big deal about the leak of Valerie Plame's identity, which probably had zero impact on natinal security, but is keeping quiet about the import of this newer leak (and the other very damaging leak about CIA prisons in foreign countries) and is not reporting about the NSA requested criminal investigation into this latest link.
In addition to these legalisms, it is pretty clear that you can't wage a war if you don't even surveil communications crossing your borders to suspected enemy agents!
Furthermore, the mere act of gathering large amounts of customer data does not mean that each customer was surveilled. It depends on how the data was used. Since the NSA has little interest in surveiling ordinary citizens (and no resources to do so), the fears of these actions are dramatically overblown.
The EFF, in its role of civil liberties extremist, is showing its lack of cocnsideration for our national security, or its failure to understand the nature of the threat we face. In other words, they are acting like irresponsible children - not for the first time.
So federal employees don't have free speech rights?
I have seen plenty of people who probably weren't federal employees do nasty things to Wiki, which were effectively censorship. Now its a federal employee. Sigh.
Censorship is when the government uses the law to prevent certain speech. An example is the stupid McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform" law.
It is not when someone, federal employee or not, abuses a system like Wiki.
The UK and the US (and much of the rest of the west) have had dramatic cultural declines over the last 30 years. In the UK it has been most dramatic in the last 15 or so. The result is decadent value sets in which many people (and this flows down to their kids) simply do not value work. The media culture is especially bad. The depradations of the looney academicians in the "education" and man liberal arts have made it worse, loosing notions and nostrums that ignore the lessions and values of centuries and replace them with faddish educational theories and crazy philosophical notions (multiculturalism, relativism, etc). The social welfare state produces children who have grown up in a subculture where work is sumply the dumb thing to do, as is any other responsible behavior.
If you don't value work (or at least understand the need to do some unpleasant things), you aren't going to exercise the parts of your brain that do math and science (unless you are a geek - we go for that stuff anyway).
This is at least one factor in the decline of abilities in the areas of math and science... math and science are hard subjects - and they require (heaven forbid) memorization and (in early math) rote learning - methodologies thoroughly destroyed by the idiots with high level degrees in education.
Who knows what other influences do - for example, videogames apparently improve abilities of young males when they are used as military combatants (a necessary but hopefully not widespread occupation). But they may degrade their abilities for math and science thinking - if nothing else than by chewing up time that might be spent in those areas.
If you want to understand what happens to the youth on the lower side of the socioeconomic scale in Britain, just read a few articles by "Theodore Dalrymple."
So much for a democratic process! It would appear that the powers, who have no greater claim to the truth than, for example, a politico, are exerting far greater influence.
Reminds me of utopian communism, where it always turns out that the people pushing it are more equal, somehow, than everyone else.
Going back and forth is not likely to end up at a "neutral" point of view. I've seen enough Wiki articles to know that.
What it is likely to end up with is a weighted average. But if A is a fact, and more people believe in or are willing to fight for not-A, you are going to end up with not-A, which is not neutral, but just wrong.
In spite of what some academicians say, there are in fact truths, which are independent of point of view. However, in anything complex, the interpretation and shading of those truths, if they appear at all, is going to be a result of the Wiki process, which bears little resemblance to truth seeking methodologicies such as science. Science is not determined by vote or determination - at least in the long run. It is determined by truth testing, and that can reveal that the vast majority are simply wrong.
The Wiki process, because it deals with many issues outside of the realm of science, simply is incapable of that level of accuracy or neutrality.
Your biases are showing.
"left wing" and "progessive" in the American political lexicon are pretty close to synonymous. Certainly "progressive" IS "left" however else you may want to characterize it. Getting upset about that characterization is pretty bizarre.
Oh, and there is lots of evidence showing links between the Saddam's government and Al Qaeda. You may choose not to believe them (it's called "confirmation bias") but it certainly is not a silly or incorrect thing for people who *do* believe them to put them in! But let's not start a thread about whether my assertion of that is true or not, because few who care enough to post are open minded enough to change their opinion based on whatever anyone says on Slashdot.
Political controversies simply cannot be neatly settled. There are legitimate difference of opinion over what seem to be settled facts. Few situations are simple enough that both sides have the same view.
So if it is political, it will be disuputed. Count on it. And telling us which interpretation is right is rather silly, unless it is about something relatively simple and solidly established in fact. I could give you a zillion examples, but that would start a huge thread of people disaagreeing with me, and name calling, and all sorts of tripe.
Get used to it. People honestly and dishonestly disagree. And some people will use whatever power they have, be it a political staff or an powerful constituency (such as that of the Democratic Underground) to fight it out in a Wiki.
Political machines?
Two years ago I ran into a political mess on Wikipedia (no details here or it will start another useless fight). One side was favored by whoever seemed to have the most veto power on the page. It wasn't my side.
I didn't have the time to fight, so that entry, which was of significant import at the time, is simply riddled with holes and full of hagiographic propaganda for the person (presidential candidate) whom it describes. It is still that way.
Wiki is a fine idea, but the more important it gets, the more it will be abused.
The sad thing is that I am seeing the same sort of thing on Snopes, although it is not open to public manipulation. I sent in a correction on an item which was judged "false" even though it never referenced the actual source (and the sources were well known). The answer I got back from their *automated* mailer was that I didn't understand enough the subject.
An automated mailer figured this out? I knew first hand the people involved, and a Snopes robot tells me I don't understand the subject? And snopes judges the information a lie when they clearly don't know the people first hand? And they don't even reference the book published by the people I know which addresses the subject in great detail, although they reference three other books from the other side of the issue?
Sigh.
If you really believe that slightly reducing anonymity "destroys us," then you are indeed an extremist.
And you are right, you do live in a fantasy land.
Sorry dude, but I wouldn't want you voting on security mesaures, because you would have absolutely none.
The founders of the United States clearly understood that there was a tradeoff between complete freedom and necessary security. Even strong libertarians recognize this... otherwise they would be anarchists!
So get a clue... you have never been completely free or completely anonymous. Some of your taxes go to protecting you. And you have no choice whatsoever about it. That's a freedom already gone. Every time you go out in public, you are subject to scrutiny by, among others, government agents such as policemen.
Absolutists are fools, whether they are communists, fascists or civil libertarians.
Sloppy thinking, IMHO. I have also worked in computer security and military security.
It seems trivially obvious that some things need to be kept secret. For example, if one is relying on a profiling system to identify possibly dangerous individuals, revealing the profiling criteria defeats the entire purpose - the malefactors will then know how to avoid being profiled.
If I had time, I could cite many other similar examples.
Just because civilian cryptographers (but not those at NSA) believe that everything about a cipher should be known for it to be secure (and thare are good reasons for both their and NSA views, depending on circumstances), it doesn't mean that every security measure that has secrets associated with it is dumb.
It is absolutely normal for people to be denied standing. If Gilmore was refused travel because he refused to show ID, then the CAPPS policies, etc, are irrelevant, because they did not come into effect. Had he been singled out by the lists, he would then have grounds to challenge them. I am normally singled out that way because my name is very common. I accept that as a price I pay as a citizen to slightly reduce the odds of another 9-11 (yes, I said slightly). Many Americans paid a vastly higher price to protect our nation from different enemies in different times. I voluntarily surrendered my civil liberties for a couple of years during the Vietnam War, which included visiting a scenic, tropical southeast asian country.
It is absolutely necessary for some procedures which affect US citizens to be secret. If they are to be effective, they must not be known to people who whould then circumvent them to cause great harm. This includes the details of the "no fly" lists. Anyone who doesn't recognize this need for secrecy (in cases like this if not this exact one) lives in a fantasy land where the slightest infringement upon civil liberties is more dangerous than the most dangerous of enemies (such as a nuclear armed terrorist). Those who leaked, and those who support the right to leak the information about NEST teams investigating mosques and certain Islamists are the most dangerous of civil liberties fundamentalists.
The fact, cited by some in this argument, that the government still has glaring holes elsewhere in its airline security has long been held by the courts as irrelevant. The government is not *obligated* to do the job of protecting you perfectly (in fact, they aren't obligated at all). They can take some measures without taking all possible measures.
The rules that Gilmore was protesting are *not* secret laws. They are secret procedures involved in enforcing non-secret regulations derived from non-secret laws. If you don't like this, go complain to your congressman. If you accept the need for such lists (and I do), then the need for secrecy in their contents and methodology is bloody obvious.
The EFF is a member of the Civil LIberties Fundamentalist church. As such, it routinely pushes as hard as it can for absolute civil liberties. In the real world, absolute civil liberties are impossible. IF a government provided them, it would immediatley cease to exist, to then be replaced by one that didn't. So civil liberties fundies are just wrong, in the ultimate extension of their goals.
But of course, my argument is a slippery slope argument, that civil liberties fundies often make. Which brings up another point: discussions of items of principle, which involve cases of specifics involved by a court, always end up with slippery slope arguments. Slippery slope arguments are simply lazy thinking, and the Supreme Court (of which I am not a great fan right now) routinely has to deal with putting boundaries along the slope, proving that it is not, in fact, slippery.
I was on a business trip, and on the island of Guam, had my wallet, passport and all identifying documents stolen. Because of the way the flights work, at least then, when you flew from Guam to Hawaii you had to not only have ID, but go through US immigration and customs.
I not only had no trouble getting on the flight, but no trouble entering the US. I suspect today it might be a little harder, but any rule like this will have (or will eventually get) ways to deal with this situation.