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All Verizon Phone Records Provided to the Government
I generally find this stuff kind of scary. Secret Courts and orders to turn over data on people.
[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/verizon-providing-all-call-records-to-us-under-court-order/2013/06/05/98656606-ce47-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html]http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/verizon-providing-all-call-records-to-us-under-court-order/2013/06/05/98656606-ce47-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html[/link]
I’ve also read about other speculation on fusion centers collecting all data and mining it.
[link=http://www.aclu.org/spy-files/more-about-fusion-centers]http://www.aclu.org/spy-files/more-about-fusion-centers[/link]
Seems if you have a cell phone you’re a suspect. -
268 Replies
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Bet ol’ soapy, hammer and pacman are for the first time proud of their country. Ol’ michelle surely is. What Constitution?? We still have one??
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The Constitution was sold during the last Administration. Suddenly you Rip van Winkles wake up & it’s Obama’s fault? Go back to sleep, you’re next to useless.
[link=http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2006/05/fbi_acknowledge/]http://abcnews.go.com/blo…06/05/fbi_acknowledge/[/link]
[link=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/washington/13fbi.html]http://www.nytimes.com/20…/washington/13fbi.html[/link]
[link=http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2079666,00.html]http://www.time.com/time/…0,8599,2079666,00.html[/link]
[link=http://www.npr.org/news/specials/patriotact/patriotactprovisions.html]http://www.npr.org/news/s…riotactprovisions.html[/link]
[link=http://www.aclu.org/free-speech-national-security-technology-and-liberty/reform-patriot-act-myths-realities]http://www.aclu.org/free-…ot-act-myths-realities[/link]
[link=http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/09/americas-most-dangerous-librarians]http://www.motherjones.co…t-dangerous-librarians[/link]
[link=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/politics/26patriot.html]http://www.nytimes.com/20…olitics/26patriot.html[/link]
[link=http://www.llrx.com/features/usapatriotact.htm]http://www.llrx.com/features/usapatriotact.htm[/link]
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In case you need more:
[link=http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/George_W._Bush%27s_phone_records_spying]http://www.sourcewatch.or…s_phone_records_spying[/link]
[link=http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/George_W._Bush%27s_domestic_spying]http://www.sourcewatch.or…sh%27s_domestic_spying[/link]
[link=http://www.aclu.org/national-security/fbi-illegally-gathered-phone-records-and-misused-national-security-letters]http://www.aclu.org/natio…ional-security-letters[/link]
[link=http://www.aclu.org/national-security/surveillance-under-usa-patriot-act]http://www.aclu.org/natio…-under-usa-patriot-act[/link]
Just google Patriot Act & phone and library records.-
saw this story on the overnight news…immediately thought of my own phone records. i’m a verizon customer, have been for many years. well, at least 2-3 times a week, usually more, i get calls from overseas pharmacies, with operators who are clearly middle eastern/pakistani. I don’t know how they got my number. from the caller id i can tell who they are…but, a few times, whilst bored, i would answer and talk to them, sometimes for quite awhile. so, to anyone perusing phone records, i’m sure this would look suspicious. multiple calls per week, sometimes with extended conversations.
wonder when i can expect a knock on my door? heh.-
[link=http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/wake-up-america-youre-letting-your-privacy-slip-away/276595/]http://www.theatlantic.co…vacy-slip-away/276595/[/link]
[link=http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/06/nsa-spying-verizon-analysis/65963/]http://www.theatlanticwir…erizon-analysis/65963/[/link]
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Lindsey thinks domestic spying is just grand.
[link=http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/lindsey-graham-nsa-tracking-phones-92330.html]http://www.politico.com/s…king-phones-92330.html[/link]-
Bandersnatch, your [style=”color: #800000;”]”democrite”[/style] is showing. Obummer has succeeded in duplicating the police actions of Nazi Germany, China, Russia and California. Wake up….this should be a wake up call to you leftist extremist lemmings. Isn’t the IRS scandal, Bengazi debacle, elimination of freedom of the press, and ol’ joey biden enough for you dems? Bet you are really a Conservative American now although you won’t admit it. How can any intelligent American be a democrite? Welfare, food stamps and unions a liberal make.
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This policy and including the patriotic act has been criticized by voices from the right and the left since instituted by Bush after 9-11
So how I see this is another need fir regulation of well meaning policy
Of course it’s being politicized but the policy needs regulated. That so obvious
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Unfortunately, on surveillance and counter-terrorism, we’re pretty much into the 4th term of the Bush administration. Obama is not significantly different.
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[link=http://www.mediaite.com/online/congrats-everyone-you-voted-for-nsa-overreach-under-obama-and-bush-now-can-we-all-finally-end-it/]http://www.mediaite.com/online/congrats-everyone-you-voted-for-nsa-overreach-under-obama-and-bush-now-can-we-all-finally-end-it/[/link]
Libertarians who struggled through the Bush years will recall how the NSA had been secretly collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, with the help of telecommunications giants like AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans most of whom arent suspected of any crime, [i]USA Today[/i] [link=http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm?csp=1]reported in 2006[/link], several years after Bush initiated the secretive program.
Given Greenwalds report, this all sounds eerily familiar. We now have confirmation that Obama has continued, if not expanded, that exact sort of egregious surveillance program. In fact, as Cato Institutes [b]Julian Sanchez[/b] told Greenwald, this Obama incident perhaps goes further with an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion.
This latest example of Obama overreach is sure to rankle the feathers of conservatives already rightfully disturbed by the DOJs extensive snooping on journalists and the IRSs intentional targeting of tea party organizations.
While many of these same conservatives were rah-rahing the expansion of the NSA and United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during the Bush years, it is a pleasant change to see them finally care about FISA. Welcome aboard.
Now its up to the liberals who lauded Obama as the anti-Bush civil liberties champion in 2008 to swallow their pride as well and take a stand against this administrations overreach, despite what they might see as partisan opportunism coming from the right.
*nods* I will swallow my pride as asked and openly say that I am quite displeased with the Obama administration in this regard. If both the left and the right are equally appalled then maybe it’s time for bipartisan legislation to tighten down on executive branch surveillance powers.
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AM record? 3 hours time from OP to “Nazi” barb.
Brilliant.
Quote from Point Man
Bandersnatch, your “democrite”[/style] is showing. Obummer has succeeded in duplicating the police actions of Nazi Germany, China, Russia and California. Wake up….this should be a wake up call to you leftist extremist lemmings. Isn’t the IRS scandal, Bengazi debacle, elimination of freedom of the press, and ol’ joey biden enough for you dems? Bet you are really a Conservative American now although you won’t admit it. How can any intelligent American be a democrite? Welfare, food stamps and unions a liberal make.
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A lot of Republicans support the domestic surveillance.
Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) backed up Feinstein, saying, This is nothing particularly new. This has been going on for seven years under the auspices of the FISA authority, and every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this.
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What’s worse, the Feds getting your information from Verizon by court order or Google and Verizon getting it for free & using it themselves and selling the information to others?
[link=http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/what-google-and-nsa-snoops-have-in-common/276612/]http://www.theatlantic.co…have-in-common/276612/[/link] -
Quote from Frumious
What’s worse, the Feds getting your information from Verizon by court order or Google and Verizon getting it for free & using it themselves and selling the information to others?
[link=http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/what-google-and-nsa-snoops-have-in-common/276612/]http://www.theatlantic.co…have-in-common/276612/[/link]
As I understand it a secret court and not a regular court. When it gets media coverage it stirs thigns up. I do agree about google too. You give up a lot of privacy having a cell phone or using any of the freeby services like gmail.
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Quote from Frumious
A lot of Republicans support the domestic surveillance.
Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) backed up Feinstein, saying, This is nothing particularly new. This has been going on for seven years under the auspices of the FISA authority, and every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this.
[link=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rdi_RNRpdk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rdi_RNRpdk[/link]
[link=http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9845595-7.html]http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9845595-7.html[/link]
[link=http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/180/end-warrantless-wiretaps/]http://www.politifact.com…-warrantless-wiretaps/[/link]
[font=”arial,helvetica,sans-serif”][size=”5″]Headline: [/size][/font]
[h1][font=”arial,helvetica,sans-serif”][size=”5″]Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me[/size][/font][/h1]
quotes from Sen Obama…” …NO MORE national security letters who are no suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizen who do nothing less than protesting a misguided war. That is NOT who we are. …..this administration (Bush) acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security..”
Obama is just a worthless regrettable lying sac/drek that you will apologize for ad infinitum because of your zeal to protect the first minority President. Go play somewhere else useless troll.
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And how is any of that relevant to you RVU when you support and have supported domestic spying? Because it’s Obama, not Bush?
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The law needs to change. Doubt this is limited to Verizon. The left has been saying this for years and Obama has let us down.
However….righties like RVU cannot help themselves with lies this was not wiretapping and it was the baby of the Bush admin. Blame Obama for not putting an end to it, but not for starting it.
Remind of your outrage in 2006 when these programs were coming on line -
Instead of politicizing this issue. This is an opportunity to fix a well meaning bill
Look like it or not this is Bush era legislation that passed because of fear
It pased with strong sentiment against from the right and the left as per civil liberties
The Obama administration continued these bush policies
Both republicans and democrats hands are dirty in this matter
So fix it. Regulate it because well intended legislation is being abused
And I must say the civil libertarians predicted this would happen 10 yrs ago. And they were right
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Quote from kpack123
Instead of politicizing this issue.
This already happened with the wide-spread stealth obama administration departments routinely targeting of “enemies” about non-security state matters internal spying on adversaries and likely executive branch direction of the IRS illegality. However, now it is not a matter of politics, but in fact very real criminal activities that are suspiciously politically-directed by the prima facie evidence all ready available. And possible high crime and misdemeanors committed by the executive branch.
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As the Tsarnaiev debacle shows, our goverment can’t find a terrorist if they get their nose pushed into him.
I am more afraid of their incompetence than their over-reaches. The three letter agencies could be cut by 90% and we wouldn’t be any less safe. -
Quote from fw
As the Tsarnaiev debacle shows, our goverment can’t find a terrorist if they get their nose pushed into him.
I am more afraid of their incompetence than their over-reaches. The three letter agencies could be cut by 90% and we wouldn’t be any less safe.
Strange, because I was thinking the same thing today for a moment. The FBI pass right over Tsarnaiev. However, the government/Eric Holder, a competent and experienced government lawyer, was quite certain that Fox reporter James Rosen was a criminal co-conspirator and needed to be monitored. This is at the same time the NYTimes revealed Wikileak docs and the drone program and wasnt (to our knowledge) investigated.
Sorry, many dont take that as randomness or incompetence, but illegal use of government agencies directed against an adversarial media outlet. It happen so blatantly with the Nixon administration. Why wouldnt it happen again with an Obama administration hyper-reactive to critics and expedient with the law as this administration has clearly shown to be? Its even eerier knowing that Holder used the Espionage Act the same way Nixon’s WH used the Espionage Act against Daniel Ellsberg after the Pentagon Papers. -
Freaking amateur
Gonzalez did investigate and consider prosecuting NYT
[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/21/AR2006052100348.html]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/21/AR2006052100348.html[/link]
Can you get one thing right, just once -
Quote from Thor
Freaking amateur
Gonzalez did investigate and consider prosecuting NYT
[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/21/AR2006052100348.html]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/21/AR2006052100348.html[/link]Can you get one thing right, just once
Yup. The anger is showing through sparky.
Is that all you can get from your furious internet search to match the mountains of Obama dirt that keeps on coming?! One investigation (not prosecution) of the NYTimes after their lead political reporter Judith Miller compromised national security, as she later admitted? And that is versus charging an innocent man with conspiracy to commit espionage because he worked for Fox, and 1000s of individuals IRS files being discriminatory manhandled and their privacy compromised because they were conservative?
Can you please be objective for once?
Or better yet, there was a famous liberal who once said the following which is apropos: “Do you have any sense of decency, at long last”. Soon enough, someone in Obama’s white house will have that said to them. -
Quote from RVU
Quote from Thor
Freaking amateur
Gonzalez did investigate and consider prosecuting NYT
[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/21/AR2006052100348.html]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/21/AR2006052100348.html[/link]Can you get one thing right, just once
Yup. The anger is showing through sparky.
Is that all you can get from your furious internet search to match the mountains of Obama dirt that keeps on coming?! One investigation (not prosecution) of the NYTimes after their lead political reporter Judith Miller compromised national security, as she later admitted? And that is versus charging an innocent man with conspiracy to commit espionage because he worked for Fox, and 1000s of individuals IRS files being discriminatory manhandled and their privacy compromised because they were conservative?
Can you please be objective for once?
Or better yet, there was a famous liberal who once said the following which is apropos: “Do you have any sense of decency, at long last”. Soon enough, someone in Obama’s white house will have that said to them.
[b]This.[/b]
RVU, I used to think some form of common sense and fairness would come out after all the evidence and discussion. I find the lack of objectivity you cite to be sad. I used to get worked up a bit but now I just feel sorry for the pathetic discipline of mind some have here.
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Apparently some as citizens take automatic denials of wrongdoing, repeated lying to government officials including judges and while under oath, intransigence to objective questioning of bad and likely illegal governance, and blanket spying as ‘commonsense’ and ‘fairness’.
I am sorry, but I dont. -
So you’ve suddenly become a Lefty, RVU, agreeing that Bush’s intrusive government was never a good idea? Even using Al Gore to defend your new outlook? Even arguing that Obama is nothing more than Bush redux? Even comparing him to another Republican President (whom you probably voted for if you are old enough), Nixon?
The Right’s new argument, Obama is bad because he is just like Bush!
Convenient chameleon you are.
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And fw, your only argument is that the government should be a more competent police state.
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Quote from stir22
May be you should just show up at J Edgar Hoover building in DC and confess., just kidding.
I think if one of those pharmacy guys decides to concot a different kind of mix., the explosive kind., u may really get a visit.saw this story on the overnight news…immediately thought of my own phone records. i’m a verizon customer, have been for many years. well, at least 2-3 times a week, usually more, i get calls from overseas pharmacies, with operators who are clearly middle eastern/pakistani. I don’t know how they got my number. from the caller id i can tell who they are…but, a few times, whilst bored, i would answer and talk to them, sometimes for quite awhile. so, to anyone perusing phone records, i’m sure this would look suspicious. multiple calls per week, sometimes with extended conversations.
wonder when i can expect a knock on my door? heh.
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Quote from stir22
saw this story on the overnight news…immediately thought of my own phone records. i’m a verizon customer, have been for many years. well, at least 2-3 times a week, usually more, i get calls from overseas pharmacies, with operators who are clearly middle eastern/pakistani. I don’t know how they got my number. from the caller id i can tell who they are…but, a few times, whilst bored, i would answer and talk to them, sometimes for quite awhile. so, to anyone perusing phone records, i’m sure this would look suspicious. multiple calls per week, sometimes with extended conversations.
wonder when i can expect a knock on my door? heh.
“But your Honor, I was just discussing the discount I can get on Viagra by ordering it from Pakistan. I had no idea they were sending weapons grade uranium free with each purchase.”
Sorry Stir, I couldn’t help myself.-
Repeal the Patriot Act & stop giving up freedoms in fear.
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Al Gore’s tweet today: [link=https://twitter.com/algore/status/342455655057211393]https://twitter.com/algor..atus/342455655057211393[/link]
[i]””In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous[/i]””
RUN AL RUN! RUN AL RUN! Give Hilary the challenge from the left. She cant be peacenik and Democratic-Cheneyist (i.e. Obama’s NSA) at the same time. Split the party of identity politics right down the middle. -
[link=http://www.aclu.org/reform-patriot-act]http://www.aclu.org/reform-patriot-act[/link]
Right or left ….. get on board!
Great chance for democrats to show they don’t have knee jerk allegiance to the Obama administration.
Great change for republicans to show they care about issues rather than simply politicizing scandal.
[b]Reform the Patriot Act[/b][b]Section 215[/b] of the Patriot Act authorizes the government to obtain “any tangible thing” relevant to a terrorism investigation, even if there is no showing that the “thing” pertains to suspected terrorists or terrorist activities. This provision is contrary to traditional notions of search and seizure, which require the government to show reasonable suspicion or probable cause before undertaking an investigation that infringes upon a person’s privacy. Congress must ensure that things collected with this power have a meaningful nexus to suspected terrorist activity or it should be allowed to expire.
[b]Section 206[/b] of the Patriot Act, also known as [b]”roving John Doe wiretap”[/b] provision, permits the government to obtain intelligence surveillance orders that identify neither the person nor the facility to be tapped. This provision is contrary to traditional notions of search and seizure, which require government to state with particularity what it seeks to search or seize. Section 206 should be amended to mirror similar and longstanding criminal laws that permit roving wiretaps, but require the naming of a specific target. Otherwise, it should expire.
[b]Section 6001[/b] of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, or the so-called [b]”Lone Wolf”[/b] provision, permits secret intelligence surveillance of non-US persons who are not affiliated with a foreign organization. Such an authorization, granted only in secret courts is subject to abuse and threatens our longtime understandings of the limits of the government’s investigatory powers within the borders of the United States. This provision has never been used and should be allowed to expire outright.
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Y’know, there’s just one thing you little Obama buttock-kissers don’t want to understand. Bush, flawed jacka$$ though he was, was after terrorists, and everybody knew that. Did his guys spy on you looking at your favorite sheep website by accident in the process of doing that? Probably a few times. But the current bunch of Putin-wannabees is targeting AMERICANS, you, me, and everyone else. They are looking for dissent, not terror, and that is one big fat huge difference.
Bushie was trying to keep us safe. Your current object of worship is trying to keep us down.
Here’s the problem with you little commies, I mean liberals. You probably do believe in what you preach. You don’t like that someone makes more than you even though you think you worked harder than them. You don’t like that there are huge extremes of rich and poor, and you somehow think that an all powerful government is gonna fix that for you. Now, I don’t doubt for a minute that your golden hearts are all in the right place, its just that your brains aren’t. You lap up the trite sayings tossed your way by the corrupt Leftist Democratic leadership, and think that they are just as sincere as you, wanting world peace and free money for everybody. Wrong. They want POWER, nothing but POWER. And maybe that’s what you want too…a Big sister/Mommy to watch your every move and gently steer you right (or left) when you don’t act like she wants you to, since you can’t make it on your own. Or maybe you think OTHER people need that level of watching, not you, and they’ll leave YOU alone. Ha ha ha.
In the meantime, I’m switching from Verizon to T-Mobile…maybe we can trust the Germans again. -
Why are you democrites suddenly becoming so moderate? Even your designated news outlet for your messiah’s propaganda, NBC, is turning against him. We have major disasters on our hands because of the obummer’s attempt to socialize our country. I haven’t even heard from ol’ babs striesand in some time. Has gagaland also abandoned him? I bet ol’ soap and hammer will stick it out to the bitter end. Well, get ready, the end is near.
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So CardiacEvent, you are verifying my statements that the only thing that’s changed is that now Obama is President so all this is evil while when it was Bush’s doing it was good. Intrinsically there is nothing bad about domestic spying and data mining, it’s only a matter of whether a Republican or Democrat does it.
It’s so simple.-
Quote from Frumious
So CardiacEvent, you are verifying my statements that the only thing that’s changed is that now Obama is President so all this is evil while when it was Bush’s doing it was good. Intrinsically there is nothing bad about domestic spying and data mining, it’s only a matter of whether a Republican or Democrat does it.
It’s so simple.
Not quite what I said, Simple. A TRUE BELIEVER such as yourself thinks that Bushie was spying mostly on US citizens but not on terrorists. Does anybody but a TRUE BELIEVER such as yourself think that Obama’s main concern is anything beyond his political opponents that he promised to punish for all the world to hear? There is a big ol’ difference that you don’t want to see.
(reworded so it makes more sense!)
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Quote from dergon
Right or left ….. get on board!
Agree. All you have to do is look at an auntminnie off topic forum entry to see how divisive things have become. It’s all ‘you’re a lefty, you’re a righty’.
This verizon thing is out there and I’m wondering more about what we don’t know the government is doing.-
Quote from DICOM_Dan
Quote from dergon
Right or left ….. get on board!
Agree. All you have to do is look at an auntminnie off topic forum entry to see how divisive things have become. It’s all ‘you’re a lefty, you’re a righty’.
This verizon thing is out there and I’m wondering more about what we don’t know the government is doing.
But data gathering and data mining is OK if it’s commercial. So the fact that Verizon & AT&T and Google & Apple & how many others have all this information on us that we don’t know about & can’t control is OK. It’s only bad if the government wants it.
And yet as fw pointed out, the government is inept because it did not use this sort of information to stop the Tsarnaev bros before the Boston Marathon bombing. Or the triple murders.
So what kind of world do we all really want, realistically speaking.-
Mhh. I misplaced a couple of company cellphone bills from 2011. Maybe I can get a copy from NSA using a FOIA request…..
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Quote from fw
Mhh. I misplaced a couple of company cellphone bills from 2011. Maybe I can get a copy from NSA using a FOIA request…..
Maybe. Give it a try & post to us your results.
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From what I have heard what is collected is data on phone usage and not conversations. It only looks at things such as when calls made, to where, and for how long. The subject of call isn’t included. Even then this a dump of raw data. Admin has to go back to court to actually look at data. If you think that you have any real privacy in this day and age, you are in lalaland. Every digital transaction you make is data mined by somebody. Try living off the grid. It is damn near impossible.
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Quote from Raddocmed
From what I have heard what is collected is data on phone usage and not conversations. It only looks at things such as when calls made, to where, and for how long. The subject of call isn’t included. Even then this a dump of raw data. Admin has to go back to court to actually look at data. If you think that you have any real privacy in this day and age, you are in lalaland. Every digital transaction you make is data mined by somebody. Try living off the grid. It is damn near impossible.
How reassuring. I guess it’s no problem then.-
Were you reassured 10 years ago then, fw? And 7 years ago? & each time the Patriot Act was renewed & all these programs? Just suddenly not anymore?
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Quote from Raddocmed
From what I have heard what is collected is data on phone usage and not conversations. It only looks at things such as when calls made, to where, and for how long. The subject of call isn’t included. Even then this a dump of raw data. Admin has to go back to court to actually look at data.
So much for that little bit of comfort ….
[link=http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-listening-to-u.s-phone-calls-without-warrants/]http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-listening-to-u.s-phone-calls-without-warrants/[/link]
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s [link=http://www.auntminnie.com/8301-13578_3-57589012-38/nsa-surveillance-retrospective-at-t-verizon-never-denied-it/]formidable eavesdropping apparatus[/link] works domestically it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
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[url=http://www.buzzfeed.com/hamzashaban/federal-judge-in-new-york-sides-with-apple-over-feds-on-encr#.vq26dr9Vdn]Federal Judge In New York Sides With Apple Over Feds On Encryption[/url]
While Apple and the FBI battle in court over an encrypted iPhone in San Bernardino, another judge across the country has dealt a significant blow to the governments case there.
U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of the Eastern District of New York denied the governments request to compel Apple to assist law enforcement in extracting encrypted information from a suspects iPhone in a drug-related case. As in the San Bernardino case, the federal government invoked the All Writs Act of 1789 (AWA) in New York asking the court to force Apple to help federal law enforcement pull information from a locked iPhone.
Orenstein rejected the request on multiple grounds although Attorney General Loretta Lynch has said the Justice Department will be seeking further review of his order.
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With IOS 9.3 you’ll clearly know if your phone is managed by your employer.
[link=http://macdailynews.com/2016/03/02/ios-9-3-makes-it-crystal-clear-if-your-work-iphone-is-being-tracked-by-your-employer/]http://macdailynews.com/2…cked-by-your-employer/[/link]-
In the “You just can’t make this stuff up!” department.
[link=http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/san-bernardino-da-says-seized-iphone-may-hold-dormant-cyber-pathogen/]http://arstechnica.com/te…ormant-cyber-pathogen/[/link]-
There is more discussion about iPhone use by criminals and whether Apple should sabotage their own software’s security as if the iPhones murdered people than there is discussion about criminals’ access to and use of actual weapons.
You can’t make this stuff up is correct.-
Leave it up to John Oliver to explain a simple concept too complicated for law enforcement & most people to understand. Oh DUH, it’s only 1 phone! Only 1 time.
[link=http://www.macrumors.com/2016/03/14/john-liver-last-week-tonight-apple-encryption/]http://www.macrumors.com/…ight-apple-encryption/[/link]
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[b]Tax-Prep Companies Shared Data with Tech Giants[/b][/h1]
Some of the nations largest tax-prep companies have spent years sharing Americans sensitive financial data with tech titans including Meta and Google in a potential violation of federal law data that in some cases was misused for targeted advertising, [link=https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/12/tech/tax-prep-companies-taxpayer-data-google-meta/]CNN[/link] reports.-
FISA looks like it might be toast. Wray is getting grilled today and the FBI has definitely abused it.
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Quote from Frumious
Quote from DICOM_Dan
Quote from dergon
Right or left ….. get on board!
Agree. All you have to do is look at an auntminnie off topic forum entry to see how divisive things have become. It’s all ‘you’re a lefty, you’re a righty’.
This verizon thing is out there and I’m wondering more about what we don’t know the government is doing.
But data gathering and data mining is OK if it’s commercial. So the fact that Verizon & AT&T and Google & Apple & how many others have all this information on us that we don’t know about & can’t control is OK. It’s only bad if the government wants it.
And yet as fw pointed out, the government is inept because it did not use this sort of information to stop the Tsarnaev bros before the Boston Marathon bombing. Or the triple murders.
So what kind of world do we all really want, realistically speaking.
This is what’s in the washington post now about secret data mining programs.
[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html]http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html[/link]
See when you sign up for gmail, facebook or something, you’re agreeing to their ToS. Like gmail will read your emails to target adds towards you. My understadning of google is they actually anonymize their data after a certain period of time. Agreeing to gmail is not the same as the government secretly taking your email to save and mine it and to me seems illegal. It’s like everyone’s a suspect. One of the things that I’ve heard speculated was that the government actually captures all internet traffic by sniffing it off the major communications routers of the ‘web’ and saves it.
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Quote from dergon
[link=http://www.aclu.org/reform-patriot-act]http://www.aclu.org/reform-patriot-act[/link]
Right or left ….. get on board!
Great chance for democrats to show they don’t have knee jerk allegiance to the Obama administration.
Fair post about an apparent similiarity between these two consecutive administrations. On the surface, Obamas initial appeal as a nobody candidate was being the ‘un-Bush’. However, Obama expanded such a wide-drag that Bush people didnt execute, no matter what the law permits. Obama promised to end this blanket-type surveilence as part of his administration. So far, we know it is a major campaign promised that was broken in secret, and subsequently lied about to the public and Congress. It is similar to George Hebert Walker Bush’s famous ‘Read My Lips’ pledge, although that major promise was broken in a very public fashion.
However, PRISM and the phone mining is coupled with the current intentional and illegal targeting of adversaries used by other government agencies with this executive branch control/overseight (IRS and DOJ). In this light, there is real potential from this administration who has denied or straight-out lied to Congress and federal judges. One has to openly wonder where Obama’s administration zeal for information stops. There will be much more to come and there is a good possibility that Obama’s white house used privacy-protected federal data about individuals in surreptitious means to target adversaries as well.Quote from dergon
Great change for republicans to show they care about issues rather than simply politicizing scandal.
Finally, about your running point about how ideologically tilted republicans have become. What occurred yesterday, likely the worst day of the Presidents administration, thoroughly runs against your argument. No ‘spite club’ with the republicans as suggested by Paul Krugman. But the quick and very vociferous support and even praise of President Obama by several prominent Republicans defending the Verizon data mining. Ranking Sens. Graham, McCain, Cornyn, Clambliss, Chairman Rodgers as well as Charles Krauthammer, and the most strident supporter, Carl Rove-all put country ahead of party about one of the most publicly contentious Obama policy’s known to date. This is in contrast to several liberal democrats including Sen/candidate Barack Obama constantly attacking the republicans and GWB white house during the hardest stages in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism. Even today, Krugman et al liberal clown barkers are continuously spewing bitter and useless narratives about republicans, even at the same time republican leadership protected Obama’s White House on one of the President’s hardest days. Seems to me your argument about republican extremism is really about constructing a partisan narrative and inaccurate talking points that turns out to be deviance labeling because you disagree with republicans about contentious policy (unfettered acceptance of alternative lifestyles/gay marriage, limited government, higher taxes, minority quotas, welfare vs workfare, gun control, etc.-which a majority of the public often sides with the republicans on each of these cardinal issues) more than empirical evidence.-
Those of you with short term or partisan memory loss problems, recall the Bushies and the FISA Court and the problems that Bush thought things were just too important to be slowed down by judges’ permission, all that wasted time about national security stuff?
[link=http://www.volokh.com/2013/06/07/ruminations-on-the-fisa-court-and-the-bush-administrations-terrorist-surveillance-program/]http://www.volokh.com/201…-surveillance-program/[/link]
Longtime readers will recall the dispute in 2005-2006 over the legality of the Bush Administrations warrantless wiretapping program, aka the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which was revealed in December 2005 by the New York Times. Recall that several DOJ officials threatened to resign over the program as unlawful in 2004, but then changes to the program were made to satisfy them that the program was lawful. As best I can recall it has been a few years the leading theory for what changes were made to make the program legal was that program was changed to be based on the AUMF instead of the Presidents Article II power. I thought of that dispute when I read this passage in [link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html]todays [i]Post[/i] story on PRISM[/link]:
[blockquote]Between 2004 and 2007, Bush administration lawyers persuaded federal FISA judges to issue surveillance orders in a fundamentally new form. Until then the government had to show probable cause that a particular target and facility were both connected to terrorism or espionage.
In four new orders, which remain classified, the court defined massive data sets as facilities and agreed to certify periodically that the government had reasonable procedures in place to minimize collection of U.S. persons data without a warrant.
[/blockquote]
[link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy]http://en.wikipedia.org/w…rveillance_controversy[/link]All wiretapping of American citizens by the [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency]National Security Agency[/link] requires a warrant from a three-judge court set up under the [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act]Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act[/link]. After the [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11]9/11[/link] attacks, Congress passed the [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act]Patriot Act[/link], which granted the President broad powers to fight a war against terrorism. The [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_administration]George W. Bush administration[/link] used these powers to bypass the FISA court and directed the NSA to spy directly on [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Qaeda]al Qaeda[/link] in a new [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_electronic_surveillance_program]NSA electronic surveillance program[/link]. Reports at the time indicate that an “apparently accidental” “glitch” resulted in the interception of communications that were purely domestic in nature.[link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy#cite_note-nytimes051221-5][5][/link]
[link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act_of_1978]http://en.wikipedia.org/w…rveillance_Act_of_1978[/link]So applause? Obama got FISA clearance.
I’m not applauding, I’m just sayin.
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Maybe some good news is that this “privacy” thing will be revisited as the Rip van Winkles wake up to the ramifications?
Or is that a joke & will just be a partisan issue that will be forgotten as soon as Obama is gone?
[link=http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/security-state-creep-the-real-nsa-scandal-is-whats-legal/276625/]http://www.theatlantic.co…is-whats-legal/276625/[/link]The Court has failed to develop a robust system for applying the Fourth Amendment meaningfully to the questions of the 21st century.
[b]”We doubt,” [link=http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=442&invol=735]the Supreme Court held[/link], “that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial.” And even if they did, the opinion continued, such an expectation would not be a “reasonable” one, for once you’ve disclosed anything to a third party, you cannot “reasonably” expect it to remain private. [/b]
That decision, in a case called [i]Smith v. Maryland[/i], is highly relevant again today. The Court decided that a local police department did not violate the Fourth Amendment (“unreasonable searches and seizures”) when, without obtaining a warrant, the police asked a telephone company to record all the numbers dialed from a suspect’s home. The year of that decision? 1979, long before the rise of our modern, counter-terrorist security state. -
Quote from Frumious
Those of you with short term or partisan memory loss problems, recall the Bushies and the FISA Court and the problems that Bush thought things were just too important to be slowed down by judges’ permission, all that wasted time about national security stuff?
For those with the other kind of memory lapse, it was Obama who ran against the blanket surveillance of US citizens.
Turns out the quote of Lord Acton still holds true today: [i]”Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”[/i]
The FISA ‘court’ is a joke, they approve 100% of records requests submitted to them.[i]
[/i]
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Exactly, but that’s neither comforting & reassuring or fuel for conspiracy.
But a program like PRISM, I’d worry about potential abuse, either by governments or by private corporations or individuals. The temptation is very high to use it. Like Chekhov’s Gun.
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Anyone remember Total Information Awareness, Admiral John Poindexter & Brian Hicks?
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[attachment=0]
[link]http://nsa.gov1.info/data/index.html[/link]
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I don’t hold Obama accountable for this mess and most of the other recent news stories and events but I do think there is ample evidence that Government is run amuck.
That being said solving this problem and holding the government agencies and individuals accountable for these issues lies squarely on his shoulders and this administration
This is an opportunity for Obama to make some positive change
Time will tell if he is up to this challenge
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Quote from kpack123
That being said solving this problem and holding the government agencies and individuals accountable for these issues lies squarely on his shoulders and this administration
This is an opportunity for Obama to make some positive change
We are lacking a ‘rolls on floor laughing’ smiley on this forum.
We are 6 years into that changey thing, Guantanamo is still open and the agencies are now spying on EVERYONE with a phone. Can’t blame him for the economy or the drought/flood cycles, the responsibility for the misconduct of executive branch agencies falls squarely on him.
Time will tell if he is up to this challenge
He is not.
As todays news conference shows, he doesn’t give a rats ass.-
The NSA is already storing all domestic phone calls, emails and all that garbage. They have massive amounts of storage space and computing power. The problem is, how do you intelligently parse out meaning from all that data?
I’m sure they already have the data anyway. The battle was over ten years ago when the NSA started eavesdropping on domestic phone calls without any sort of judicial oversight.-
Something to think about:
[link=http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/civil-liberties-a-gop-civil-war/]http://www.theamericancon…rties-a-gop-civil-war/[/link]
But not everyone in the GOP is on board with this great privacy awakening. Sen. Rand Paul, hes a libertarian, and in Rand Pauls world you have almost no defenses against terrorists, blustered South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. In Rand Pauls world, you cant hold somebody for questioning whos been involved in an attack on our country.
Give Graham credit for consistency: unlike other Republican opportunists, he wants Barack Obama to exercise the same untrammeled executive powers he believes belonged to George W. Bush. No matter who the commander-in-chief is, he says America is a battlefield.
Thats why the ascendancy of Rand Paulwho would be as quick to criticize warrantless surveillance under President Romney, Ryan or Rubiotears open a real debate within the Republican Party.
[b]For one side maintains that low taxes and the sanctity of innocent human life can somehow coexist with permanent war. The other side realizes that if the homeland is a battlefield, we must live under something closer to martial law than the Bill of Rightsa proposition incompatible with limited government.[/b]
[b]South Carolinas senior senator accuses Paul of believing that people in our government are a bunch of Nazis rather than patriotic Americans.
[/b]
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Again from what I read this isn’t surveillance on any individual as the data is comglomerate in nature. Separate order has to be obtained to use the data for evaaluating any invidual. The government as had the ability to obtain much more invasive data for decdes as long as they have a court order. As far as I know those orders were usually if not always secret.
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The information is already being collected everyday only by private corporations. This is not a new setup to gather information, it’s already being gathered. The government is only saying, “Let me see that too.”
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Something to think about:
[link=http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/civil-liberties-a-gop-civil-war/]http://www.theamericancon…rties-a-gop-civil-war/[/link]
But not everyone in the GOP is on board with this great privacy awakening. Sen. Rand Paul, hes a libertarian, and in Rand Pauls world you have almost no defenses against terrorists, blustered South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. In Rand Pauls world, you cant hold somebody for questioning whos been involved in an attack on our country.
Give Graham credit for consistency: unlike other Republican opportunists, he wants Barack Obama to exercise the same untrammeled executive powers he believes belonged to George W. Bush. No matter who the commander-in-chief is, he says America is a battlefield.
Thats why the ascendancy of Rand Paulwho would be as quick to criticize warrantless surveillance under President Romney, Ryan or Rubiotears open a real debate within the Republican Party.
[b]For one side maintains that low taxes and the sanctity of innocent human life can somehow coexist with permanent war. The other side realizes that if the homeland is a battlefield, we must live under something closer to martial law than the Bill of Rightsa proposition incompatible with limited government.[/b]
[b]South Carolinas senior senator accuses Paul of believing that people in our government are a bunch of Nazis rather than patriotic Americans.
[/b]
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Mike Miller nails it…a lot of this has to do with our own narcisscism and self-importance that the govt actually would want to spy on us
[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/matt-miller-edward-snowdens-grandiosity/2013/06/11/b87876e6-d292-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html]http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/matt-miller-edward-snowdens-grandiosity/2013/06/11/b87876e6-d292-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html[/link]
Edward Snowden was appalled.
They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type, the then-anonymous Snowden told reporters as his leaks first emerged.
Well, so can Google. And Facebook. And most companies internal networks. Creepy? You bet. Calamitous? Not so clear.Thinking about big data is a little like imagining how things look to God (assuming God exists). God may love you personally, but shes a little too busy to worry about whether you get that raise you deserve. The National Security Agency (NSA) may have access to every bit and byte in the land, but the unfathomable river of information their algorithms must mine means no ones focusing on the text you sent to that guy in accounting.
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The main problem with Mike Miller’s article is that no one is analyzing the content of those messages. The data that’s collected never goes beyond the header. Big deal. Most internet companies invade your privacy far deeper than that, which is why when I do a search for a product, I then go to a news page where there’s an ad for that product waiting for me.
Get over it or become an off-the-grid hermit, but it’s totally unrealistic to prevent other organizations to record your interactions within society. Wear sunglasses and a wig, close your curtains, pay with cash, write letters, cancel cable, take a buses and trains, don’t talk to other people. See if that makes you feel more like a free American within this commercially-driven free enterprise democratic republic.
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Quote from Lux
The main problem with Mike Miller’s article is that no one is analyzing the content of those messages. The data that’s collected never goes beyond the header. Big deal. Most internet companies invade your privacy far deeper than that, which is why when I do a search for a product, I then go to a news page where there’s an ad for that product waiting for me.
Get over it or become an off-the-grid hermit, but it’s totally unrealistic to prevent other organizations to record your interactions within society. Wear sunglasses and a wig, close your curtains, pay with cash, write letters, cancel cable, take a buses and trains, don’t talk to other people. See if that makes you feel more like a free American within this commercially-driven free enterprise democratic republic.
The only problem is the metadata/header really knows a lot. Like location etc.. I think one of the things we’ll end up hearing from these leaks is how the government actually gets all that other data your talking about that the private companies are collecting, like the facebook, googles etc… In a surveilance state it’s like being guilty no matter what, instead of innocent until proven guilty.
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Quote from DICOM_Dan
The only problem is the metadata/header really knows a lot. Like location etc.. I think one of the things we’ll end up hearing from these leaks is how the government actually gets all that other data your talking about that the private companies are collecting, like the facebook, googles etc… In a surveilance state it’s like being guilty no matter what, instead of innocent until proven guilty.
Credit card companies [i]already[/i] track your location. If you charge a few things in Minnesota today and then travel to Arizona tomorrow, there’s a very good chance your Arizona charge will be declined as “suspected fraud” unless you call the card company in advance and tell them about your travel plans. That’s true even if you used that same credit card to buy your airfare to Arizona!!
I don’t look at it as being “guilty no matter what”. There’s nothing wrong with security monitoring. Every responsible store, bank, parking lot, office building, etc. do it. This discussion acts like this is something new and shocking. Jeez, if anything, the US government is far behind in its security monitoring compared to even the standard household that has security cameras on the property! As far as I can tell, the feds are simply “catching up” to the security measures being taken by just about every other organization in the country.
I think this is a silly discussion based on unreasonable paranoia which is totally impractical in a society as complex as America has become. But I guess that’s just my opinion.
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If you want to live off the grid you have to live off the grid. No credit, only cash, no smartphones, no phones, period, no internet & no Skype, no Amazon, no numerous other things we take for granted. Even 3rd world countries have cell phones. Even cash is no foolproof. Look at London where there are cameras everywhere. Cameras on US streets, at intersections, in stores, satellites & GPS. Some science fiction movies with satellites with face recognition.
Disappearing ain’t what it used to be.
Calling Philip K. Dick!-
Quote from Frumious
…Dick!
Interesting. Looks like AM finally loosened up its puritanical censorship and now allows adults to express themselves without having to codify people’s names!
Let’s see: Dick Cheney…
Whoa.
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[link=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iFf5lEaXk7A]http://www.youtube.com/wa…page&v=iFf5lEaXk7A[/link]
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Quote from radmike
[link=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iFf5lEaXk7A]http://www.youtube.com/wa…page&v=iFf5lEaXk7A[/link]
[i]”The question here is: ‘What do they do with this information they collect?'”[/i]
– Joe Biden, 2006
I think the feds in the Obama administration have answered that sufficiently appropriately and acceptably. At the time Biden made that statement, the Bush administration had not yet come forth to explain their use of that information. And so I totally agree with Biden’s sentiment that there was no reason to trust Bush and Cheney with such information. After all, Bush/Cheney were the ones who said that we should duct tape our windows to keep anthrax out of our homes, that we should live our lives according to a color warning scale which Bush/Cheney used to install fear in Americans weekly for no good reason, and that we should tattle on our neighbors when they so much as show any curious behavior at all; recall the rash of nuisance calls that came in from across the country from anyone with a neighbor that they wanted to harass and bully. It got so bad that local communities pleaded with the public to stop turning in anyone that exhibited strange behavior. No one was ever caught doing a any bad things despite all of the Bush/Cheney fear mongering at the time.
But thanks for pointing out that the law that enables the federal government to acquire such data was indeed established under the Bush II administration and years before Obama took office.
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Actually, I think that the Obama administration has proven to be completely untrustworthy and deceptive in light of recent revelations.
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Quote from radmike
Actually, I think that the Obama administration has proven to be completely untrustworthy and deceptive in light of recent revelations.
To what “revelations” do you refer? I’m unfamiliar with any recent transgressions attributed to the White House.
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Don’t waste your time Radmike.
You are dealing with people who get a thrill up their leg at the site of Bama.
Caveman intellect.
Bush = bad
Bama = good-
I agree with you Ben. Talking with them is like trying to carry on an intelligent conversation with my goldfish. I get blank stares and something always smells fishy.
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Quote from radmike
I agree with you Ben. Talking with them is like trying to carry on an intelligent conversation with my goldfish. I get blank stares and something always smells fishy.
Cute evasion.
Nothing more.
And how on earth do you know what it’s like to carry on an intelligent conversation with your [i]goldfish[/i]? Man, talk about something smelling “fishy”…
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Quote from Lux
Quote from radmike
I agree with you Ben. Talking with them is like trying to carry on an intelligent conversation with my goldfish. I get blank stares and something always smells fishy.
Cute evasion.
Nothing more.
And how on earth do you know what it’s like to carry on an intelligent conversation with your [i]goldfish[/i]? Man, talk about something smelling “fishy”…Soapy, stop carping. Why are you so crabby? You are such a sucker. Sometime you are as slick as an eel and such a leech. You attack like a shark, but are more like a blowfish. Stop being so crappy and start being a starfish. Enough “fishy” stuff for you?
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[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-limbaugh-paul-cross-the-line-in-nsa-critiques/2013/06/13/b7fbebf2-d455-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html]http://www.washingtonpost…bcbee06f8f8_story.html[/link]
Republicans waking up at the crazy extremists in their midst?
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I just read that Michael Gerson article. Mostly agree with it. I take issue with his notion of the great “achievement” of out anti-terrorism efforts spanning across two administations. One of the reason I voted for the current administration was because I believed we had an imbalance between security efforts and liberty in the post-9/11 Bush administration. I [i]thought[/i] that Mr. Obama agreed with me.
Otherwise though, the piece is dead on.-
There are many things about this Administration I question, like this surveillance. Obama is hardly the leftist ideologue the Right makes him out to be as he is very comfortable as a Centrist including being comfortable with some of Bush’s policies. But throwing rocks from the outside is also easier than when it becomes your responsibility.
But considering the reality that this information exists already with private companies who not only are capable of doing similar analysis albeit from a marketing perspective and do, is this more a molehill than government mountain? The potential for abuse exists but that is not solely limited to government abuse.
Gerson and others are waking to the realization that making nut arguments can weaken the opposition and is therefore useful but then controlling the nuts in your party is another issue when it continues to drag you down & actually make you look like nothing more than a paranoid nut job. Yes, the Levins and Rushs and Palins and Fox News crew will grow rich feeding angry paranoia to fans but to what end? Or once Obama is history the imagined future will be a Conservative Utopia where Government once again is good providing “good government,” meaning zero taxes, Social Security, Medicare and citizenship and high spending/deficits but only to the deserving while the 47% will be shown their place?
-GERSON
But asserting that U.S. intelligence agencies are part of a conspiracy that somehow includes a national gun registry, drone surveillance and Lois Lerner crosses a line. It is one thing to oppose the policies of the administration;[b] it is another to call for resistance against a regime and a police state. It is the difference between skepticism about government and [u]hatred for government[/u].[/b]
This distinction between opposition and resistance is illustrated in attitudes toward the leaker Edward Snowden. If our country is being run by a regime, then those who expose its machinations are heroes, as some on the right have called Snowden. If the U.S. government is a fallible institution doing its best to protect citizens from terrorist violence, then a libertarian loner who reveals classified material (including U.S. cyberwarfare plans) and [link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/10/this-is-the-definition-of-heroism-snowden-lauded-in-china/]bolts for a communist country[/link] might be viewed in a different light.
And larger things are at stake. Questioning the legitimacy of our government is the poisoning of patriotism. It is offensive for the same reasons it was offensive when elements of the left, in the 1960s and 1970s, talked of the American regime. Because it distorts the United States into something unrecognizable in order to advance a partisan ideology. Because this is still the last best hope of earth, not a police state. [b]Because Americans have fought and died for this country, and to turn on it in this way is noxious. [u]It is dishonest. And it is dishonorable.[/u][/b]So is Snowden a hero or traitor? How about Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks and Julian Assange? Heros all?
How about some who believe government is bad because it is always evil and incompetent & then use the NSA to bolster the argument by arguing out of both sides of the mouth like the government surveillance is evil but government is also bad and incompetent because it did not catch the Boston bombers before they performed their crimes. We need Pre-Crime.
But then this is logic & logic is an intrusion in these discussions, aren’t they.-
Would those that applaud this disclosure, would you change your mind if it had been given to a foreign government instead of a newspaper.
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Couple of interesitng things I’ve heard on the media. something interesting I heard on the radio this morning. They were talking about these phone records and now the thought is that if someone is accused of commiting a crime can they subpoena the records from the NSA to prove their innocence. The phone call data has location information. On the daily show last night they had a picture of the data center being built by the government to house the records and they were talking about data size in terms of yottabytes, which is hard to fathom. That’s a lot of data. Which made me think why can’t they do something like that for the good of the people. Like a data center to store and facilitate PHI exchange between healthcare entities.
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Quote from DICOM_Dan
Couple of interesitng things I’ve heard on the media. something interesting I heard on the radio this morning. They were talking about these phone records and now the thought is that if someone is accused of commiting a crime can they subpoena the records from the NSA to prove their innocence. The phone call data has location information. On the daily show last night they had a picture of the data center being built by the government to house the records and they were talking about data size in terms of yottabytes, which is hard to fathom. That’s a lot of data. Which made me think why can’t they do something like that for the good of the people. Like a data center to store and facilitate PHI exchange between healthcare entities.
They would subpoena the phone company involved, not the No Such Agency.
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Looks like Snowden has become more hero for his actions of revealing NSA eavesdropping.
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*nods* Obama was asked about whether he is considering a pardon for Snowdon. And given the recent court ruling that at least some of the NSA programs are likely unconstitutional his case as a “whistle blower” gets a bit stronger.
But, I don’t think you’re going to see Edward Snowdon pardoned by the Obama administration … at least not until December 2016 at the earliest.
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Quote from Raddocmed
Would those that applaud this disclosure, would you change your mind if it had been given to a foreign government instead of a newspaper.
The only disclosure really is a reminder that government is and has been doing this for some years now. This is more a verification. Is there something else I’ve missed other than some minor particulars?
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Quote from dergon
I just read that Michael Gerson article. Mostly agree with it. I take issue with his notion of the great “achievement” of out anti-terrorism efforts spanning across two administations. One of the reason I voted for the current administration was because I believed we had an imbalance between security efforts and liberty in the post-9/11 Bush administration. I [i]thought[/i] that Mr. Obama agreed with me.
Otherwise though, the piece is dead on.
I take you as a bright individual. You know what candidate Obama distinctly said and campaigned on, being not like George Bush, in particular about security issues. At that time, he used language that made it seem we were living in a security state Bush and his coteries constructed.
Yet obama lies so easily and thoroughly about this issue that even a firm liberal like yourself shakes his head. He either continued or heightened all his predecessor security policy right from the beginning of his administration and then distinctly and likely illegally augmented them. It begs the question, what else has he lied and been superstitious about? Has he broken the law thinking he’s to clever or buffered by cronies to get caught? People who are neutral and oppose obama already know the answer to this is likely.-
You seem so bright, yet you are so stupid, dergon!
Great argument RVU, dergon should be opposed to Obama because Obama is continuing many of the policies of the President you supported, George “Dubbya” Bush. Why can’t he just see that?
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What is funny is these are the people that would not let the word lie be used when the WMD argument was going on
Now everything is a lie
I have my political beliefs but this partisan delusion is really taking everything too far
Our country gets mislead into a war that cause 12 Trillion and thousands if lives and casualties yet they defend it and refuse to entertain the word lie
You guys are ridiculous. That’s why your party is getting smaller and smaller
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Quote from kpack123
You guys are ridiculous. That’s why your party is getting smaller and smaller
And stupider and stupider.
And more despised by the general public.
And less likely to generate ideas that will lead the USA though the tough problems.And Boehner is starting to show signs that he knows this all too well to be the real truth about the catastrophic collapse of extreme conservatism in the USA.
Good riddance.
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A couple of things relating to “conservatism.”
[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/24/josh-barro-didnt-leave-conservatism-conservatism-left-josh-barro/]http://www.washingtonpost…atism-left-josh-barro/[/link]
Over the last few years, the Republican Party has been retreating from policy ground they once held and salting the earth after them. This has coincided with, and perhaps even been driven by, the Democratic Party pushing into policy positions they once rejected as overly conservative.
As the Republican Partys range of acceptable policies has narrowed, the Democratic Partys range has expanded. Stimulus based entirely on tax cuts? Its not their preference, but theyll take it. Market-based approaches to environmental regulation? Sure, why not. Capping the employer-based exclusion for health care? Of course. Hundreds of billions of dollars in entitlement cuts to help reduce the deficit? Uh-huh.
The result, as Ive written before, is that [link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/the-shocking-truth-about-the-birthplace-of-obamas-policies/2011/04/15/AF6qINpE_blog.html]President Obamas record makes him look like a moderate Republicans from the late-90s[/link].
The choices for Republican policy wonks are stark. You can take the approach of Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponnuru and evince a continual disappointment that the Republican Party doesnt embrace more new ideas and be constantly on the lookout for glimmers of hope that never quite seem to herald the coming of dawn. Or you can take the approach of Barro, or David Frum, and hammer the Republican Party for ceding so much important ground. Either way, the underlying problem is that todays Republican Party, from a policy perspective, occupies a much narrower space than even 2005s Republican Party. The change has been quick and severe.
And George Will of all people says something I agree with for a change. conservatives say they want smaller government & yet in their areas of interest support large government. What a surprise. Only that a conservative sees the contradiction.
[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-congress-slips-its-constitutional-leash/2013/06/14/f5e2c1aa-d443-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html]http://www.washingtonpost…bcbee06f8f8_story.html[/link]
Seven years later, the Constitutions commerce clause was the rationale for the Mann Act banning the transportation of females for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose. Including, it turned out, noncommercial, consensual sex involving no unhappy victim.
Today, Congress exercises police powers never granted by the Constitution. Conservatives who favor federal wars on drugs, gambling and other behaviors should understand the damage they have done to the constitutional underpinnings of limited government.
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Looks like that hero of the Right, Dick Chaney supports government surveillance.
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Quote from Frumious
Looks like that hero of the Right, Dick Chaney supports government surveillance.
They were HIS policies! Of course he supports them! This way he can show Americans that Obama is so bad he’s doing things BUSH’s way!
But of course, such methods being legal (thanks to Dick and George), Obama MUST use them because he’d get rolled over the coals if we were attacked and it turned out that Obama didn’t use every legal deterrent method available to him, regardless how unpopular that method is.
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Good Nate Silver piece on the politics of surveillance … for both parties.
There are also some cool DW-Dominate charts breaking down congress on not just the liberal/conservative axis but the “establishment/outsider” axis and intraparty fault lines.
[link=http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/domestic-surveillance-could-create-a-divide-in-the-2016-primaries/#more-40366]http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/domestic-surveillance-could-create-a-divide-in-the-2016-primaries/#more-40366[/link]
A [link=http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-phone-tracking-as-acceptable-anti-terror-tactic/]poll[/link] released on Monday by the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post found a partisan shift in the way Americans view the National Security Agencys domestic surveillance programs. In the survey, slightly more Democrats than Republicans said they found it acceptable for the N.S.A. to track Americans phone records and e-mails if the goal is to prevent terrorism. By comparison, when Pew Research asked a similar question in 2006, Republicans were about twice as likely as Democrats to support the N.S.A.s activities.
The poll is a reminder that many Americans do not hold especially firm views on some issues and instead may adapt them depending on which party controls the executive branch. When it comes to domestic surveillance, a considerable number of Democrats seem willing to support actions under President Obama that they deemed unacceptable under George W. Bush, while some Republicans have shifted in the opposite direction.
In the chart below, Ive sorted the 403 members of the House who voted on the bill {Patriot Act Extension} from left to right in order of their overall degree of liberalism or conservatism, as determined by the statistical system [link=http://voteview.com/dwnomin.htm]DW-Nominate[/link]. Members of the House who voted for the bill are represented with a yellow stripe in the chart, while those who voted against it are represented in black.
[image]http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/06/11/us/politics/fivethirtyeight-0611-nsa1/fivethirtyeight-0611-nsa1-blog480.png[/image]
In the case of the Patriot Act vote, the establishment-outsider axis makes nearly as much difference as the liberal-conservative or Democratic-Republican scales. Among the so-called establishment members of the House who voted on the bill, 78 percent voted to extend the Patriot Act, while only 41 percent of the so-called outsiders did, according to DW-Nominates classifications.
Debates on domestic surveillance could serve as proxy battles for these intraparty factions. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, perhaps along with other Republican candidates, could use his opposition to surveillance programs to [link=http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/how-viable-is-rand-paul-for-2016/]help consolidate the support[/link] of libertarian and Tea Party voters, at the risk of alienating national security conservatives. Democratic candidates who criticize the Patriot Act or the N.S.A.s actions will be finding fault with policies that Mr. Obama has defended and Mr. Obama will very likely remain quite popular among Democrats three years from now.
In some ways, it may prove invigorating to have a political debate that does not break down all that neatly into the usual partisan camps. And because they create as many fractures across the parties as between them, the recent N.S.A. disclosures might not have all that much effect, for instance, on Mr. Obamas approval ratings or the Congressional elections next year.
But theres the possibility that surveillance policy could become a major issue in the 2016 primaries, as elites in each party defend themselves against rank-and-file voters who are critical of their judgment.-
Some more interesting things about the NSA
[link=http://gizmodo.com/exactly-how-the-nsa-is-getting-away-with-spying-on-us-c-540606531]http://gizmodo.com/exactly-how-the-nsa-is-getting-away-with-spying-on-us-c-540606531[/link]
aparently if you even encrypt email they keep said email.
”
[b]Using Email Encryption or Tor Is Grounds for Surveillance[/b]
At EFF, we have long recommended anyone who cares about privacy should use tools such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) email encryption and Tor, which anonymizes your location. We still do, but are disturbed by the way the NSA treats such communications.
In the United States, it has long been held that there is a [link=https://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Speech:_Anonymity]Constitutional right to anonymous speech[/link], and exercising this right cannot be grounds for the government to invade your privacy. The NSA blows by all that by determining that, if the person is anonymous, then[i]necessarily[/i] the NSA is not intentionally targeting a US person, with a rare exception when they have “positively identified” the user as an American. Thus, in the NSAs view, if you use Tor, the protections for a US person simply do not apply.
More appallingly, the NSA is allowed to hold onto communications [i]solely because you use encryption[/i]. Whether the communication is domestic or foreign, the NSA will hang on to the encrypted message forever, or at least until it is decrypted. And then at least five more years”-
So is Snowden a hero or traitor?
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Quote from Frumious
So is Snowden a hero or traitor?
I’m not sure what to make of him. I heard Bruce Bartlett on the radio this morning say he’d be more heroic if he stayed to face the piper which sound like something I’d agree with. I find most of what we’re hearing pretty interesting. I had a prof who told us about this kind of blanket surveillance the government does which at the time sounded kind of funky but now it’s plastered all over the news.
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Quote from Frumious
So is Snowden a hero or traitor?
If what NSA is doing is legal (and it sure sounds like it is), then he is a traitor.
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Quote from Lux
Quote from Frumious
So is Snowden a hero or traitor?
If what NSA is doing is legal (and it sure sounds like it is), then he is a traitor.
My take is it is not legal based on the US constitution and they’re playing losely with the rules, assuming what I read in gizmodo is accurate.
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What part of the Constitution is the NSA violating?
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Quote from Lux
What part of the Constitution is the NSA violating?
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Blanket gathering of peoples electronic data seems to violate the 4th amendment absolutely.-
Quote from DICOM_Dan
Quote from Lux
What part of the Constitution is the NSA violating?
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.Blanket gathering of peoples electronic data seems to violate the 4th amendment absolutely.
+1 imho, a clear 4th ammendment violation
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Quote from DICOM_Dan
Quote from Lux
What part of the Constitution is the NSA violating?
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.Blanket gathering of peoples electronic data seems to violate the 4th amendment absolutely.
Sorry, but I respectfully disagree on multiple counts.
First,
Phone calls are made in your house but the information from those calls leave your house and go around the world. Nothing protects you outside your property borders and the IV Amendment is VERY clear about that. That’s why it is perfectly legal for anyone (government OR non-government) to drive by your house with a dish microphone to see if they can hear what is going on inside the house. If you whisper, no one may enter to hear what you are saying. But if you do anything that leaves your property, all bets are off. That includes, if you stand at the edge of your property and shout out loud, or if you have your house lights on full blast with your drapes and windows open at 11pm, or if you communicate in any other way to a location outside your property borders. If you have something secret to say, invite the guy over to your house and you are protected by the IV Amendment as long as what you say cannot be detected by someone located outside your property line. That is what the law says, and it says that pretty friggin’ clearly.Second,
You seem to totally disregard the legal meaning of “unreasonable”. On that basis alone, the NSA’s collection of the point to point data is totally legal based on historic events which imbued “reasonable” into such data collection.Third,
There is no systematic gathering of the CONTENT of those phone calls. Sure, the NSA has said that they are “perfectly able to listen in on the calls” but they just don’t do that simply because it is prohibited by law (who would doubt that they have full access to such technology?). They only collect the point to point data which is where they draw the “reasonable” line, and so the NSA is clearly going out of its way to deliberately limit its data collection out of respect for your IV Amendment protection.Look, this is a repeating theme; the screaming Mimi’s on Faux, et al. may convince some people that the feds are getting into our bathrooms and our beds illegally, but that is simply the result of mean, ideological fear mongering honed to a fine art by the media who wants you to keep coming back to hear the latest so that they can brag to their sponsors about the size of their reader-/viewer-ship. But the fact is, not a single law has been shown to be broken, at least not by anyone of authority in the executive branch.
The truth is, when you simply look at the laws without imposing a personal/ideological filter, then it becomes clear from the facts — as they stand, ideologies aside — that the current administration has indeed behaved responsibly and admirably to preserve our liberties, our national security, and our way of life.
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But all this has been known for years! The below posts are years old.
[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006_pf.html]http://www.washingtonpost…R2007110700006_pf.html[/link]
His first inkling that something was amiss came in summer 2002 when he opened the door to admit a visitor from the National Security Agency to an office of AT&T in San Francisco.
“What the heck is the NSA doing here?” Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, said he asked himself.
A year or so later, he stumbled upon documents that, he said, nearly caused him to fall out of his chair. The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it.
[link=http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm]http://usatoday30.usatoda…n/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm[/link]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.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
[b]QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: [/b][link=http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa-qna_x.htm]The NSA record collection program[/link]
“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person
[link=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html]http://www.nytimes.com/20…olitics/16program.html[/link]
Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad.
[link=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/us/01nsa.html]http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/us/01nsa.html[/link]
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the[link=http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org]National Security Agency[/link]s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administrations effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President [link=http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/index.html?inline=nyt-per]George W. Bush[/link].
The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administrations claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the [link=http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/foreign_intelligence_surveillance_act_fisa/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier]Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act[/link], or FISA, required warrants.
In the midst of the presidential campaign in 2008, Congress overhauled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to bring federal statutes into closer alignment with what the Bush administration had been secretly doing. The legislation essentially legalized certain aspects of the program. [b]As a senator then, [link=http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per]Barack Obama[/link] voted in favor of the new law, despite objections from many of his supporters.[/b]
I think the real crime here is that so many Americans don’t read the news outside of what the outrage media community tells them. So back then the Right was not outraged because Fox, et al did not tell them to be outraged?
But now they’ve been told the time is now and the Right is outraged.
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Their goldfish must have told them it was time for outrage.
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Quote from Lux
Quote from DICOM_Dan
Quote from Lux
What part of the Constitution is the NSA violating?
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.Blanket gathering of peoples electronic data seems to violate the 4th amendment absolutely.
Sorry, but I respectfully disagree on multiple counts.
Well… at least one federal judge agrees with the 4th Amendment assessment.
[link=http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/national-security-agency-phones-judge-101203.html]http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/national-security-agency-phones-judge-101203.html[/link]
A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency program which collects information on nearly all telephone calls made to, from or within the United States is likely unconstitutional.
[b]U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon found that the program appears to violate the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.[/b] He also said the Justice Department had failed to demonstrate that collecting the information had helped to head off terrorist attacks.-
Quote from dergon
A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency program which collects information on nearly all telephone calls made to, from or within the United States is likely unconstitutional.
[b]U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon found that the program appears to violate the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.[/b] He also said the Justice Department had failed to demonstrate that collecting the information had helped to head off terrorist attacks.My skeptic radar goes into full bloom when I see a judge ruling based on outcome instead of legal principle. The judge should not be concerned about whether such surveillance methods have helped head off terrorist attacks. As far as the judge can tell, maybe terrorists are being neutralized at the front end because they know they’ll get caught by such surveillance right at the outset. How does the judge know that terror attacks won’t escalate rapidly the moment terrorists learn that such surveillance methods can no longer be used?! I mean for that matter, how do judges know whether ANY laws against murder actually work?! And why should they care? Their job is simply to assess whether a law has been violated, not whether the law actually works.
This sounds eerily like SCOTUS and the voting rights act: Scalia said the law was no longer necessary because there hasn’t been much abuse reported lately, thereby totally disregarding any possible deterrent effect the law had. And so now we see Holder pursuing possible violations in several stes now that the law has been repealed.
The courts should only determine whether a law is legel and should not be concerned about whether it actually works.
Determining whether a law works is the job of the law makers, not the law enforcers.
Any department store can record any motion and sound that is occurring within its walls in case it needs to go back to the archives as part of a crime deterrent efforts. They don’t get accused of eavesdropping. Such measures are considered “reasonable” to deter crime. This seems very similar to what the NSA is doing and so it should be considered a “reasonable” crime deterrent measure, too. So I disagree with the U.S. District Court’s decision about whether it has met the “reasonable” standard.
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Quote from Lux
Quote from dergon
A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency program which collects information on nearly all telephone calls made to, from or within the United States is likely unconstitutional.
[b]U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon found that the program appears to violate the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.[/b] He also said the Justice Department had failed to demonstrate that collecting the information had helped to head off terrorist attacks.My skeptic radar goes into full bloom when I see a judge ruling based in outcome instead of principle. The judge should not be concerned about whether such practices has helped head off terrorist attacks. As far as the judge can tell, maybe terrorists are being neutralized at the front end because they know they’ll get caught by such surveillance right at the outset. How does the judge know that terror attacks would escalate rapidly the moment terrorists learn such surveillance methods can no longer be used?!
The judge most certainly should be concerner with the effectiveness of the practice. Part of 4th Amendment precedent is showing “exigency” in order to undergo surveillance without a warrant, balancing the competing interests of the State versus the right of the citizenry. If the program isn’t effective to start with then there is no urgency or need and the exigency requirement is not met.
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Quote from dergon
The judge most certainly should be concerner with the effectiveness of the practice. Part of 4th Amendment precedent is showing “exigency” in order to undergo surveillance without a warrant, balancing the competing interests of the State versus the right of the citizenry. If the program isn’t effective to start with then there is no urgency or need and the exigency requirement is not met.
Yes yes, I agree with you, but we must be careful how we assess exigency. It seems to me to be a no-brainer to argue that surveillance is a deterrent. It’s one reason that virtually zero crime occurs in Times Square, NYC. Should a judge rule that all video cameras should be removed from that ‘hood since there’s been no record of crime there in recent years?!
One could argue that the NSA methods have been EXTREMELY effective since we’ve had zero terror attacks on out soil in recent years while such methods have been in effect.
If a law is so good at deterring crime that there’s never a case on record of it being violated, that’s certainly not proof that the law was ineffective! On the contrary, it’s proof that the law is damn near perfect!
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If a law is so good at deterring crime that there’s never a case on record of it being violated, that’s certainly not proof that the law was ineffective! On the contrary, it’s proof that the law is damn near perfect!
That is awful, awful logic. When considering a violation of a citizen’s constitutional rights, the burden of proof of efficacy and urgency lies with the State, not the other way around.-
Quote from dergon
If a law is so good at deterring crime that there’s never a case on record of it being violated, that’s certainly not proof that the law was ineffective! On the contrary, it’s proof that the law is damn near perfect!
That is awful, awful logic. When considering a violation of a citizen’s constitutional rights, the burden of proof of efficacy and urgency lies with the State, not the other way around.
Again I agree. A traffic light is typically installed only AFTER multiple deaths occur at an intersection. Likewise,when it was shown that 9/11 was made possible due to telecommunications between bad guys that could have been monitored and detected, the exigency bar was met. And now that the “traffic light” has been installed, no more transgressions have occurred. What am I missing? What more “urgency” needs to be proven?
In my opinion, either the US will appeal the District Court, or it will simply continue doing it secretly outside public law as part of the military code that transcends the Constitution in the name of national defense, just as China was prevented from buying Unocal, and our military is subject to the parallel tribunal court system, etc.
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This is collection of metadata..how much expectation of privacy is there with electronic information voluntary signed over to a private business? Quite frankly I am more concerned with revenue (I mean traffic) cameras then this program.
That being said I see no reason for it to be secret and I see no reason the govt can’t come clean on how this program has benefitted (or not benefitted) us. What are the costs and is it effective.
To me this is a classic self-inflicted wound of trying to keep stuff secret and act like they are hiding something more nefarious.-
I think the fundamental principle here is that unless it’s “secret” it will become ineffective. Once we know how it’s used, it can easily be defeated. For example, if an employer says, [i]”We know you looked at that secret file because we monitor activity on your workstation”,[/i] then the next time you can simply commit the transgression from another person’s workstation. But if you don’t know any better, you must consider that they could be using hidden cameras, hidden microphones, employing spies among the workforce, etc. The more it remains unknown, the more secure it is.
It’s the same reason Coca Cola never patented its recipe. Knowing any details about the scope and limits of a technology often allows you to easily defeat it. That’s not very handy when it comes to national security. After all, it’s the reason NSA got the nickname No Such Agency in the first place.
I personally do not believe the Fourth Amendment has been violated because I believe the collection of metadata meets the “reasonable” bar, and such methods do not “impose” on the public in any material way suggested by the Fourth Amendment. Besides, where does the Fourth Amendment protect against personal “communication”? It only protects [i]”persons, houses, papers, and effects”[/i] in terms of the [i]”place to be searched, and the persons or things to be siezed”[/i]. The Amendment clearly is referring to imposition to inspect and seize personal property.
From the standpoint of “reasonableness”, it seems like a very far stretch to consider a “communication” to be a “place” or a “thing” considered in the Fourth Amendment.
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Besides, where does the Fourth Amendment protect against personal “communication”? It only protects [i]”persons, houses, papers, and effects”[/i] in terms of the [i]”place to be searched, and the persons or things to be siezed”[/i]. The Amendment clearly is referring to imposition to inspect and seize personal property.
There is nearly 100 years of 4th Amendment legal precedent making electronic communications covered by the 4th Amendment. See Olmstead v. USA dissenting(1928) and Katz v. USA (1967). As long as phones have existed, communications have been at issue with 4th Amendment. And since ’67 there has been clear precedent. “What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.” ” …once it is recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects people-and not simply “areas”-against unreasonable searches and seizures it becomes clear that the reach of that Amendment cannot turn upon the presence or absence of a physical intrusion into any given enclosure.”
Justice Stewart: “The Government’s activities in electronically listening to and recording the petitioner’s words violated the privacy upon which he justifiably relied while using the telephone booth and thus constituted a ‘search and seizure’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”
Louis Brandeis who wrote the dissent in Olmstead in 1928 sounds like a prophet now: “The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.”
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I would just like to have all this information private & strictly under our control, not in the hands of government or private corporations to use as they will. It is not their right to be able to track me via my phone or credit card or whatever. We should be given the right to opt in to have Amazon track our purchases & even then the application should be strictly limited. Even Google maps can be creepy, especially if they photograph you outside your own home.
Corporations should have to get our specific permission & not obtain it via blackmail as in you can’t use our phone or software, etc unless we can track you. Giving up your privacy should not be blackmailed out of you.
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The point is, whatever the law is, you still cannot guarantee that any comm that exits your property will ever be private. The Founders knew this which imho is why the Fourth COULD just as easily have been written to include private conversations, smoke and candle signals, etc., but the Founders clearly deliberately steered clear of including it and instead go out of their way to only include physical things.
In my opinion the 100 year precedent of including communication as a Fourth Amendment provision is the result of judicial overreach in interpreting the law. But then I have a problem with the traditional interpretation of the Second Amendment also.
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In my view it is critical to dissociate this form “wire-tapping” this is nothing of the sort. Were they collecting all our recorded phone cons, that would be entirely different
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Quote from Thor
In my view it is critical to dissociate this form “wire-tapping” this is nothing of the sort. Were they collecting all our recorded phone cons, that would be entirely different
I think it’s possible that we probably only know the tip of iceberg of what they are actually collecting. I was listening to an Obama press conference the other day and he was talking about the collecting meta data and the point was so they knew if a known terrorist would phone someone in the US. Which made me think if you know the terrorists phone, why not just wiretap and hack or do whatever they do to just that number.-
Quote from DICOM_Dan
I think it’s possible that we probably only know the tip of iceberg of what they are actually collecting…if you know the terrorists phone, why not just wiretap and hack or do whatever they do to just that number.
I’m assuming it’s just as you say: we don’t actually know what they’re collecting. And so I think it’s fair to assume they’re collecting everything their technology allows them to collect.
And so I think it’s fair to say they ARE tapping the lines of “known” terrorists, but all that does is tell you who the terrorist is calling. It doesn’t reveal much about the network, chain of command, other cells involved, NEW terrorists not already “known”, etc., etc.
It’s just like the drug world: the FBI knows who some drug dealers are, but they don’t want to bust the street guys, they want to trace the calls all the way back to the big cheese. And so just tapping a known guy’s line won’t reveal the kingpin. To do THAT you need to build a network of data and look at the patterns.
Regarding this NSA issue, they collect masses of metadata so that they can trace the calls throughout the network, they can see the spread of who the “known” bad guys call, but then they can ALSO see how that information spreads around the network, and can possibly track it to where it might circle back to the guys on top. You can build a far more meaningful dragnet if you focus on more than just the “known” bad guys. We must assume the terrorist network is fluid, with newbies entering the networks all the time. And so we need the tools to keep our intelligence up to date and daisy fresh.
Bottom line: Anti-terrorism can’t be accomplished by simply listening in on a relatively few phone calls from “known” bad guys. We need to cast the net much wider if we expect to track down the guys on top.
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A New York federal judge rules essentially the polar opposite of last week’s ruling.
[link=http://gigaom.com/2013/12/27/courts-split-over-nsa-phone-records-new-ruling-says-spy-program-is-legal/]http://gigaom.com/2013/12/27/courts-split-over-nsa-phone-records-new-ruling-says-spy-program-is-legal/[/link]
A federal judge in New York has rejected an ACLU challenge to a controversial NSA program to collect phone records, ruling on Friday that the program does not violate the Constitution. The decision comes two weeks after the judges counterpart in Washington, DC, came to the [link=http://gigaom.com/2013/12/17/how-feds-use-one-seed-and-3-hops-to-spy-on-nearly-everyone/]opposite conclusion[/link] and described the program as Orwellian and a probable violation of the First and Fourth Amendments.
In the new ruling (embedded below), US District Judge William Pauley III repeatedly invokes 9/11, Edward Snowden and the specter of terrorist threats in rejecting the ACLUs claims that the metadata collection is too broad. Pauley stressed that the NSA requires all the phone records to connect dots:
[blockquote] Because, without all the data points, the Government cannot be certain it connected the pertinent ones the collection of virtually all telephony metadata is necessary to permit the NSA, not the FBI, to do the algorithmic data analysis that allow the NSA to determine connections between known and unknown international terrorist operatives.
[/blockquote] He added:
[blockquote] Armed with all the metadata, NSA can draw connections it might otherwise never be able to find.
[/blockquote] The decision also likens the NSAs sweep of phone records to government monitoring of Western Union transactions. It stresses that the metadata (a massive list of phone numbers and call records) belongs to the phone companies, not phone users, and likens it to police investigations based on Facebook and other instances of the third party doctrine a legal situation where people cant claim privacy rights because they have passed on personal information to another person or company.
The different legal outlooks are apparent in Pauleys decision, which warned of judicial-Monday-morning-quarterbacking national security issues. The line did not appear to be a direct swipe against his counterpart, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, though Pauley did make several references to Leons decision, which caused a stir by imposing a future injunction on the government phone program.
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there are bad people out there
you need to be able to connect all the dots before you can understand the importance of the data you are collecting..I mean you never know the importance of the simple act of printing out a radiology report on a certain day for a fellow clinicianQuote from dergon
A New York federal judge rules essentially the polar opposite of last week’s ruling.
[link=http://gigaom.com/2013/12/27/courts-split-over-nsa-phone-records-new-ruling-says-spy-program-is-legal/]http://gigaom.com/2013/12/27/courts-split-over-nsa-phone-records-new-ruling-says-spy-program-is-legal/[/link]
A federal judge in New York has rejected an ACLU challenge to a controversial NSA program to collect phone records, ruling on Friday that the program does not violate the Constitution. The decision comes two weeks after the judges counterpart in Washington, DC, came to the [link=http://gigaom.com/2013/12/17/how-feds-use-one-seed-and-3-hops-to-spy-on-nearly-everyone/]opposite conclusion[/link] and described the program as Orwellian and a probable violation of the First and Fourth Amendments.
In the new ruling (embedded below), US District Judge William Pauley III repeatedly invokes 9/11, Edward Snowden and the specter of terrorist threats in rejecting the ACLUs claims that the metadata collection is too broad. Pauley stressed that the NSA requires all the phone records to connect dots:
[blockquote]Because, without all the data points, the Government cannot be certain it connected the pertinent ones the collection of virtually all telephony metadata is necessary to permit the NSA, not the FBI, to do the algorithmic data analysis that allow the NSA to determine connections between known and unknown international terrorist operatives.
[/blockquote] He added:
[blockquote]Armed with all the metadata, NSA can draw connections it might otherwise never be able to find.
[/blockquote] The decision also likens the NSAs sweep of phone records to government monitoring of Western Union transactions. It stresses that the metadata (a massive list of phone numbers and call records) belongs to the phone companies, not phone users, and likens it to police investigations based on Facebook and other instances of the third party doctrine a legal situation where people cant claim privacy rights because they have passed on personal information to another person or company.The different legal outlooks are apparent in Pauleys decision, which warned of judicial-Monday-morning-quarterbacking national security issues. The line did not appear to be a direct swipe against his counterpart, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, though Pauley did make several references to Leons decision, which caused a stir by imposing a future injunction on the government phone program.
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[link=http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-23/nsa-s-spying-on-phone-calls-illegal-u-s-privacy-board.html]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-23/nsa-s-spying-on-phone-calls-illegal-u-s-privacy-board.html[/link]
More groups aligning on the “collection is illegal” side
[b]NSAs Spying on Phone Calls Illegal: U.S. Privacy Board[/b]
The U.S. National Security Agency is illegally collecting phone call records from millions of Americans and the program should be stopped, a federal privacy board recommends in a report issued today.
The five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created by Congress to protect privacy under post-Sept. 11 anti-terrorism laws, said in a 238-page report that the program has provided only minimal help to the U.S. in thwarting other terrorist attacks, according to the report.
By questioning the programs legality, the panel may give ammunition to critics in Congress and fuel legal challenges. At the same time, the boards 3-2 split on the question of legality of collecting phone data from such carriers as [link=http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/VZ:US]Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ)[/link] and AT&T Inc. may diminish the impact of the report and highlights the complexities of balancing security and democratic freedoms. -
Rand Paul sues Obama in federal court over NSA surveillance.
[link=http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-12/obama-sued-by-rand-paul-over-surveillance-as-challenges-grow-1-.html]http://www.bloomberg.com/…hallenges-grow-1-.html[/link]
President [link=http://topics.bloomberg.com/barack-obama/]Barack Obama[/link] was sued by Senator Rand Paul over U.S. electronic surveillance he claims is illegal, adding to challenges that may land post-Sept. 11 government data collection in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Kentucky Republican announced today that he had filed his complaint in Washington federal court. Paul was joined as co-plaintiff by[link=http://www.freedomworks.org/about/about-freedomworks]FreedomWorks Inc.[/link], a Tea Party-backed group. The filing couldnt be immediately confirmed in court records.
The government is collecting phone data about U.S. citizens without any belief by defendants at the time of collection or retention or searches that any of the information is connected with international terrorism or an international terrorist organization, in violation of the U.S. Constitutions Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches, according to a draft copy of Pauls suit provided by his office.
Consumers willingness to provide companies with information about themselves to get phone service does not reflect a willingness or expectation that they are surrendering the privacy of the information, Paul said in his complaint.
The suit challenges the [link=http://www.nsa.gov/]National Security Agency[/link]s bulk collection of phone records of millions of Americans, a program disclosed last year by former agency contractor Edward Snowden.-
Rand Paul is a traitor. We didn’t see any Democrats suing Bush for lying about Iraq (a Marconi helium weather balloon trailer was[i] “indisputable proof”[/i] of a mobile WMD factory?) and sending 4000+ of our kids to their death.
These Republicans have become nothing less than despicable.
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Rand Paul..if what he said about Christie’s wife is true..then that’s never presidential and as Aldi predicts he will never be elected as president and we can take that to the bank
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what is his medical board status
past history of prank with aqua/ vet process will be interesting to see what comes up but his 15 minutes won’t land him in white house…the Obama voters will remember thisQuote from Lux
Rand Paul is a traitor. We didn’t see any Democrats suing Bush for lying about Iraq (a Marconi helium weather balloon trailer was[i] “indisputable proof”[/i] of a mobile WMD factory?) and sending 4000+ of our kids to their death.
These Republicans have become nothing less than despicable.
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Quote from Noah’sArk
what is his medical board status
past history of prank with aqua/ vet process will be interesting to see what comes up but his 15 minutes won’t land him in white house…the Obama voters will remember thisQuote from Lux
Rand Paul is a traitor. We didn’t see any Democrats suing Bush for lying about Iraq (a Marconi helium weather balloon trailer was[i] “indisputable proof”[/i] of a mobile WMD factory?) and sending 4000+ of our kids to their death.
These Republicans have become nothing less than despicable.
His status would appear to be ‘not someone I would see for my eyes’[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/11/08/rand-paul-has-another-problem/]http://www.washingtonpost…l-has-another-problem/[/link]
In the spring of 2010 [link=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/14/rand-pauls-doctor-credentials-questioned-lacking-boards-certification/]stories[/link] first swirled around Sen. Rand Pauls [link=http://reason.com/blog/2010/06/15/looking-through-rand-pauls-eye]certification[/link] as an ophthalmologist by an outfit called the National Ophthalmology Board, an entity he founded. This week I discovered that while he continues to present himself as board certified the NOB has been [i]out of business since 2011[/i], and in any event, does not under Kentucky law permit him to advertise as board certified. -
lol..thanks for the article
Quote from DICOM_Dan
Quote from Noah’sArk
what is his medical board status
past history of prank with aqua/ vet process will be interesting to see what comes up but his 15 minutes won’t land him in white house…the Obama voters will remember thisQuote from Lux
Rand Paul is a traitor. We didn’t see any Democrats suing Bush for lying about Iraq (a Marconi helium weather balloon trailer was[i] “indisputable proof”[/i] of a mobile WMD factory?) and sending 4000+ of our kids to their death.
These Republicans have become nothing less than despicable.
His status would appear to be ‘not someone I would see for my eyes’
[link=http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/11/08/rand-paul-has-another-problem/]http://www.washingtonpost…l-has-another-problem/[/link]
In the spring of 2010 [link=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/14/rand-pauls-doctor-credentials-questioned-lacking-boards-certification/]stories[/link] first swirled around Sen. Rand Pauls [link=http://reason.com/blog/2010/06/15/looking-through-rand-pauls-eye]certification[/link] as an ophthalmologist by an outfit called the National Ophthalmology Board, an entity he founded. This week I discovered that while he continues to present himself as board certified the NOB has been [i]out of business since 2011[/i], and in any event, does not under Kentucky law permit him to advertise as board certified.
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Erin Burnett points out to Rand just now that he misspelled the word Columbia…like what is his board status again..heehee
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Noah, while you are at it researching Rand Paul’s credential why don’t you find out what happened to Obama’s college transcripts or his birth certificate?
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Aldi..please get over Obama derangement syndrome with the birth certificate issue…it makes you look trumped
Quote from aldadoc
Noah, while you are at it researching Rand Paul’s credential why don’t you find out what happened to Obama’s college transcripts or his birth certificate?
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[link=http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=276276920&m=276276921]http://www.npr.org/player…276920&m=276276921[/link]
Good story on NPR this morning on how more and more federal judges are not giving the benefit of the doubt to spy agencies when they claim “in the interest of national security”.
I am hopeful that we are beginning to see the early swing of the pendulum back toward privacy and away from “anything in the name of security” that had swung so far in the post 9/11 era.
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[link=http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-29/snowden-nominated-by-norwegian-lawmakers-for-nobel-peace-prize.html]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-29/snowden-nominated-by-norwegian-lawmakers-for-nobel-peace-prize.html[/link]
President [link=http://topics.bloomberg.com/barack-obama/]Barack Obama[/link] wants to see Edward Snowden clapped in irons and bound to the U.S. for a criminal trial. Two Norwegian politicians have a different fate in mind for Snowden: the Nobel Peace Prize.
Norwegian parliamentarians Snorre Valen and Baard Vegar Solhjell nominated Snowden for the award — the same honor Obama himself won in 2009 — for his disclosures about National Security Agency spying.
The idea that the Nobel committee would bestow its most prestigious prize on a man some in the U.S. consider a traitor drew a dismissive response from a White House official, who said Snowden instead should be tried as a felon.
The public debate and changes in policy that have followed in the wake of Snowdens whistleblowing have contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order, Valen and Solhjell, who represent the Socialist Left Party in the Norwegian parliament, wrote in their nomination letter, which was obtained by Bloomberg. Solhjell was environment minister in the former Labor-led government. -
Rand Paul is looking more and more like the GOP’s front runner. I’m OK with that. Christie is toast.
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Paul will be toast soon to once the war of women lands upon him
I mean there is still the aqua boogie past historyQuote from aldadoc
Rand Paul is looking more and more like the GOP’s front runner. I’m OK with that. Christie is toast.
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