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Hater Depot
Joined: 29 Mar 2005
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 Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 8:25 pm Post subject: NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls |
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Remember when Bush promised that the NSA was collecting information only on suspicious people, and only in the case of an international call? Ha ha, joke's on us.
Oh, except it's not funny.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm
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The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
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"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.
For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made � across town or across the country � to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.
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Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency's domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.
The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop � without warrants � on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.
In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."
As a result, domestic call records � those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders � were believed to be private.
Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information. |
There is a lot more at the full article as well as some interesting sidebars. |
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Horangi Munshin
Joined: 06 Apr 2003
Location: Busan
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| Posted: Sat May 13, 2006 2:50 am Post subject: |
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| Yeah Now Spying on Americans! |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Sat May 13, 2006 5:32 am Post subject: |
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Reminds me of another ongoing American project........Total Information Awareness. For all we know, it is still ongoing. Talk about Newspeak, reminds me of some of the communist names for their own projects --- Committee of People's awareness, or the Ministry of State Protection...
DD |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat May 13, 2006 3:07 pm Post subject: |
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[deleted]
Last edited by Gopher on Sat Jun 10, 2006 11:23 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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some waygug-in
Joined: 25 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sat May 13, 2006 3:17 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0605130078may13,1,6514281.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
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chicagotribune.com >> Technology
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Experts say phone firms at law's edge
Verizon hit with $5 billion lawsuit
By Bob Secter and Jon Van, Tribune staff reporters. Andrew Zajac of the Tribune's Washington Bureau contributed to this report
Published May 13, 2006
The furor over the National Security Agency's collection of Americans' phone records intensified Friday, with one telecommunications giant slapped with a $5 billion damage suit for allegedly violating privacy laws and the former head of another firm saying through a lawyer that his company refused to participate because he thought the program was illegal. |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sat May 13, 2006 4:53 pm Post subject: |
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The Datamining Scare
Another nonthreat to your civil liberties.
Saturday, May 13, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
The Bush Administration's Big Brother operation is at it again--or so media reports and Democrats this week would have us believe. We suspect, however, that this political tempest will founder on the good sense of the American people much like the earlier one did.
Last December, the New York Times reported that after 9/11 the National Security Agency began listening to overseas phone calls of suspected terrorists, including calls placed from or received inside the U.S. This was supposed be a scandal because the tapping was done without a warrant from something called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But as the debate wore on, it became clear that the 1978 FISA statute didn't block a President's power to allow such national-security wiretaps, and that most Americans expected their government to eavesdrop on terror suspects.
Now comes a sensationalist USA Today front-pager suggesting an even larger scandal. The government is "amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans--most of whom aren't suspected of any crime." Worse, reporter Leslie Cauley writes, while President Bush had suggested after the wiretapping story that "domestic call records" (her words) were still private, we now know that's "not the case."
Democrats are outraged, or at least they pretend to be. And major papers have joined the chorus, with the Washington Post calling the newly reported program a "massive intrusion on personal privacy." We're prepared to be outraged, too, if somebody would first bother to explain in detail what the problem is.
Let's start by debunking Ms. Cauley's piece of journalistic sleight of hand. President Bush never suggested that domestic call "records" were private. He has said actual warrantless surveillance was restricted to conversations that involved an overseas party: "The government does not listen [our emphasis] to domestic phone calls without court approval." Datamining and wiretapping are not the same thing. So much for the "Bush lied" angle to this story. Yes, Mr. Bush could have volunteered the larger "datamining" details at the time. But no President is obliged to divulge every secret program, especially one central to war-fighting. Had Mr. Bush done so, we doubt Democrats and the press corps would have sat back and said OK, thanks, let's move on--not when they see his poll numbers and sense a chance to take back Congress this autumn.
And once it's clear that telephone records are all we're talking about here, the rest of this alleged scandal melts away. Nobody has suggested one single call has been listened to as part of the program reported this week by USA Today. Rather, the datamining appears to keep track, after the fact, of most calls placed to and from a great many phone numbers in the U.S. In other words, the scary government database contains the same information you see on your monthly phone bill--slightly less, in fact, since names aren't attached to numbers and never will be unless government computers detect activity suspicious enough to warrant some being singled out of billions of others.
And what might the government do with these records? Well, it might use them to break up a suspected terror plot--presumably after requesting a surveillance warrant for any future domestic calls it actually wants to listen to (nobody has suggested otherwise). As important, the database will enable us to respond much more effectively to the next terrorist attack. Once the ringleader or leaders are identified, this information will make it much easier to track down any remaining comrades and prevent them from committing future crimes.
In short, the database is utterly non-invasive in itself and merely provides information for law enforcement to use, with warrants whenever necessary. By using this technology to find terrorists in haystacks before they can strike, the government can afford not to resort to the much more heavy-handed inspection and inconvenience practiced by necessity in, say, Israel. Liberals who object to datamining should wait until they see the "massive intrusion on personal privacy" that Americans will demand if the U.S. homeland gets hit again.
Alas, even some Republicans are buying into the notion that datamining is cause for alarm. Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter has threatened to subpoena the major U.S. phone companies to explain why they've been cooperating with the government. California Democrat Dianne Feinstein predicts "a major constitutional confrontation" over Fourth Amendment guarantees against "unreasonable search and seizure." And Michigan's John Conyers--who would take over House Judiciary if Democrats win in November--wants a bill to ensure that phone records are collected within the confines of FISA.
But since the database doesn't involve any wiretapping, FISA doesn't apply. The FISA statute specifically says its regulations do not cover any "process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing." As to Ms. Feinstein's invocation of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court has already held (Smith v. Maryland, 1979) that the government can legally collect phone numbers since callers who expect to be billed by their phone company have no "reasonable expectation of privacy" concerning such matters.
So the law appears to be on the Bush Administration's side here. And so does public opinion. An ABC News/Washington Post poll yesterday found that 63% of those surveyed approve of the database program. That's similar to the public's reaction to the warrantless wiretapping controversy, and helps explain why the President's critics on surveillance issues rarely have the courage of their professed civil libertarian convictions.
Instead, they will quibble endlessly over procedural formalities while conceding the broad policy goals. The chutzpah prize on this score goes to Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, whose position on wiretapping is that we should definitely be listening to al Qaeda but that Mr. Bush has committed an impeachable offense by doing it the wrong way. Republicans would love to see a Democratic Presidential nominee take that proposition into the 2008 election.
Most Americans seem to be cooler customers, or perhaps they can sort substance from mere political opportunism. After all, even most of the Democratic critics of datamining don't say they'd stop it. They just want to see it "investigated" and supervised--by them and their fellows in Congress, so they can pound away at the President without having to take responsibility for keeping America safe.
Perhaps Americans outside Washington understand that it's probably not an accident that the homeland hasn't been attacked again since 9/11, and that maybe--just maybe--the aggressive surveillance policies of the Bush Administration are one reason. |
http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?id=110008376 |
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desultude
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Location: Dangling my toes in the Persian Gulf
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| Posted: Sat May 13, 2006 5:03 pm Post subject: |
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Joo, is there anything this administration does that you can't find some way to defend?
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat May 13, 2006 9:05 pm Post subject: |
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[deleted]
Last edited by Gopher on Sat Jun 10, 2006 11:24 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Sat May 13, 2006 9:15 pm Post subject: |
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| desultude wrote: |
Joo, is there anything this administration does that you can't find some way to defend?
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Sure , I don't agree about stem cell research , I support a gas tax - a big one 5.00 a gallon use it to fix social security and invest in alternative energy. I also favor affirmative action when needed. I think the US can't afford 3 billion dollars a year of aid to Israel - (the US has a budget deficit) . I also favor dropping the embargo on Cuba.
I agree with Bush more or less on national security on other stuff well I don't very often.
Indeed Clinton ( both of them ) agree with Bush more or less on national security issues. |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Sat May 13, 2006 10:59 pm Post subject: |
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| desultude wrote: |
| Joo, is there anything this administration does that you can't find some way to defend? |
Coming from a paid hack neo-con propagandist ideologue, obviously no: NOT MUCH ... |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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| Posted: Sat May 13, 2006 11:28 pm Post subject: |
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Cheney Pushed Warrantless Domestic Wiretaps: NYT
Sat May 13, 11:09 PM ET
NEW YORK (AFP) - US Vice President Richard Cheney pushed after the September 11 attacks for practically unlimited intercepts of domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without court warrants in "the hunt for terrorists", The New York Times reported in its Sunday edition.
Citing two unnamed senior intelligence officials, the newspaper said lawyers for the National Security Agency, reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted in late 2001 that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country.
The NSA's position ultimately prevailed.
But just how General Michael Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary NSA officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear, the report said.
President George W. Bush on Monday named Michael Hayden to lead the CIA.
By several accounts, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks, the paper pointed out. |
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Hater Depot
Joined: 29 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Sun May 14, 2006 12:00 am Post subject: |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sun May 14, 2006 12:25 am Post subject: |
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| I always found it interesting how people who used both cell phones and the internet always seemed really really concerned about internet privacy but never gave much thought to their cell phones. |
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desultude
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Location: Dangling my toes in the Persian Gulf
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| Posted: Sun May 14, 2006 1:08 am Post subject: |
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| mindmetoo wrote: |
| I always found it interesting how people who used both cell phones and the internet always seemed really really concerned about internet privacy but never gave much thought to their cell phones. |
I never assume privacy- on the internet or the phone. I am sure that mostly it is private, but I am not naive. |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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