First, I'm not into repeating myself from pages 5 and 6. Second, I was addressing Deep Wilcox who I believe is in the coverage area. For all others, you can go to Vonage or cable phone or prepaid cell if you are so offended. Happy now?
Nice threadjack that you are not allowed to be disturbed by this unless you are pristine in your phone service choices. I find it bizarre that one of the responsibility wonks here (who I tend to agree with when he brings up personal responsibility) is so okay with this.
If you are such of an opinion, I'm not sure why you would support a company that you believe is complicit with violating civil rights. That's just basic common sense. You have options. Okay with what? I think the government acted atrociously.
Even if I could get Qwest, I still would make calls to others on other networks and ISPs, so due to the nature of the US and world networks and routing, as long as the major telecoms are doing this, it might as well be everyone. So it does and should matter to all, as we do not have a full choice in this. And I don't just care about this for me, this is a common issue. I called it a threadjack because it was one thing to bring that up, but you haughtily carried it on so that the original topic stopped being argued. I actually was interested to hear more fleshed out arguments from you because I was surprised at your response to this. I shouldn't have to write this out, but here goes: governments, private persons, and companies large & small have responsibility not to break laws no matter what, or face consequences. The immunity is for the telecoms, not the entire government but it does protect those who were entrusted to run the government lawfully and with accountability. If you are upset with the government's behavior, the administration's mission to give blanket immunity to a very willing and guilty accomplice should not be so easily tolerated. Since you know that governments can act atrociously if they are not stood up to, why would you give immunity to any party who has illegally put together systems of data mining that you are not allowed to know anything about and cannot challenge the accuracy once the data is in place? It was natural for the major telecoms to go with this, setting up systems is what they do, I'd bet they were excited by the technical challenges of it. Surely they were told not to worry about the law-breaking aspects, that would be dealt with later. Funny though, that defense never works for anyone else. The precedent of this is disturbing. We were not without ways to monitor suspected 'terrorists' and find new ones, this was complete overreach that broke the workable laws that we had regarding this.
There is a plenty of anecdotal evidence that the administration had the horn for being able to deploy the NSA's technology domestically. As usual the terror hype came second.
I've gone and racked my bookshelf and realized i lost the book i wanted to quote from - but Bob Woodward (for one) mentions this issue in passing when it came on to the radar years back. As I say - the material is anecdotal, but it's always worth bearing in mind that the way things come about is often very different to the means by which they are "sold in". That cuts both ways. There may be extremely logical reasons to do something - but a project is instead sold on highly emotive points because the 'logic' is too hard to sell. Secondly there always an enormous number of agendas and ideas out there, whose 'ships suddenly come in" die to favourable circumstances. The security ship has definitely come in. From what I've read, you are looking at a situation where the WOT presented a great opportunity to get Data mining through - rather than a case where the WOT demanded data mining. Datamining is every police man's wet dream. It's also overlooked that the NSA certainly was illegally spying on Americans well before Bush anyway, during the course of its illegal offshore spying activities
what would happen if customers started requesting assurances that their data would not be mined? or are all suppliers doing this as a routine?
This blog provides a really good point by point smack-down of the talking points on this issue being touted by the admin and collaborating hacks like Rockefeller, etc. http://www.juliansanchez.com/2008/03/08/substandard/
Quite a pleasant surprise. The House is showing some intestinal fortitude with regard to NSA eavesdropping and telecom immunity. As usual, Glenn Greenwald provides a good summary...... http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/ Greenwald's conversation (linked within the article) with New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt, Jr. is particularly interesting as Holt gives a good rundown on why the House bill on this issue is miles better than the obsequious piece of crap passed by Rockefeller and the other Senate jellyfish.
That's a good piece in Salon. I have to say that this is the first time that I've been proud of the House dems. And Rockefeller can eat shit and die as far as I'm concerned.
I didn't know where else to put this, but I wanted to describe a real-world consequence of the half-knowledge that we have about these programs. My team forum has members from all over the world. I've shared online chats with a few of them in different countries, including a couple of middle eastern countries. I've always recognized that it's possible that my communications could end up being monitored due to the strange variety of countries I talk to, but we're mostly talking about soccer and nonsense, nothing interesting, just a waste of time for anyone, so I try not to think about it much. I'm not doing anything wrong, there should be no reason to alter my behavior or not make these communications. However... recently I was at a client (I do business consulting) and something came up about soccer and one thing leads to another and I mention this neat forum that I go to and talk to people from all over the world about our team and that I even chat with some of them. Their faces get very serious and they ask if I've ever chatted with them on my laptop while at their office. Of course the answer is no, I wouldn't do that at a job. But they know that I do connect to the chat client to be available to other clients. So now, they've became deeply concerned that they are being monitored because I have logged in at their IP. These are people who are conservatives who generally support the "war on terror" but now they are feeling first hand the paranoia that this unknown data mining brings. What is the algorithm that makes one a target for monitoring? Is one of the triggers connecting to a certain combination of countries? Who is looking at this? Do "they" read the nonsense I'm writing, which would show that I'm not a terrorist (but since most Americans don't know anything about soccer, maybe they think the terms I'm using are code? Alert alert! Horsehead is talking about "red cards" again!) Once you are flagged as someone who has an intriguing communication circle do they ever unflag you when and if they determine you are harmless? I mean it's ridiculous to think about, I'm not a paranoid person, but then it naturally leads to those I may have bigsoccer PMs with, which is a wider circle than the few I have had chats with since I run a busy fantasy league with 45 of the forum members. Are the PM systems of forums monitored? Seems like forum PMs would be a good way for da bad guys to communicate, gotta track those. Having felt the sickening chill in the room and up our spines when my client and I discussed this (a first-hand orwellian moment) we tried to blow it off with some awkward joking and stilted laughs. But they have since (reluctantly) asked me not to log onto the internet while at their office, something that makes my job difficult to do. So whether or not I am being monitored (which I am probably not, but who knows?) this is the disgusting result of the current mysterious and unknown communications spying dragnet and the resulting paranoia. Does this remind anyone of anything, any place, any era?
Nacchio, the Qwest guy who got convicted of insider trading, got his conviction overturned due to the judge not allowing certain (allegedly) exculpatory evidence on nat. sec. grounds.
I should have remembered the rules. Don't ever get out of the boat.... and don't ever tell anyone about your bigsoccer thang.
Michael Mukasey’s Tears of a Clown Michael Mukasey's tearful lies (updated below - Update II) ..."Speaking in San Francisco this week, Mukasey demanded that the President be given new warrantless eavesdropping powers and that lawbreaking telecoms be granted amnesty. To make his case, Mukasey teared up while exploiting the 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 and said this: ... We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went." .... These are multiple falsehoods here, and independently, this whole claim makes no sense. There is also a pretty startling new revelation here about the Bush administration's pre-9/11 failure that requires a good amount of attention. Even under the "old" FISA, no warrants are required where the targeted person is outside the U.S. (Afghanistan) and calls into the U.S. Thus, if it's really true, as Mukasey now claims, that the Bush administration knew about a Terrorist in an Afghan safe house making Terrorist-planning calls into the U.S., then they could have -- and should have -- eavesdropped on that call and didn't need a warrant to do so. So why didn't they? kasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe house." It just didn't. Nor does the House FISA bill require individual warrants when targeting a non-U.S. person outside the U.S. ...... Mukasey was even more dishonest in demanding amnesty for lawbreaking telecoms. According to today's admiring Wall St. Journal Editorial, this is what Mukasey said on that subject: The AG also addressed why immunity from lawsuits is vital for the telecom companies that cooperated with the surveillance after 9/11. "Forget the liability" the phone companies face, Mr. Mukasey said. "We face the prospect of disclosure in open court of what they did, which is to say the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence against foreign targets." Al Qaeda would love that. Mike Mukasey was a long-time federal judge and so I feel perfectly comfortable calling that what it is: a brazen lie. Federal courts hear classified information with great regularity and it is not heard in "open court." There are numerous options available to any federal judge to hear classified information -- closed courtrooms, in camera review (in chambers only), ex parte communications (communications between one party and the judge only). No federal judge -- and certainly not Vaughn Walker, the Bush 41 appointee presiding over the telecom cases -- is going to allow "disclosure in open court of . . . . the means and the methods by which we collect foreign intelligence." And Mukasey knows that.
That was my first thought too. This whole situation is exactly why Dubya loves, and liberally uses, those ****ing things. Present compromise to the media, and when they and the American people aren't looking, amend the bill to whatever the **** you want it to be - classic George W. Bush.
Didn't he drop another "Congress should get this FISA bill done" comment before his latest trip? Bushies are deathly afraid of any of their shenanigans leaking out in a courtroom. There has not been this kind of out & out campaigning from the W.H. on a piece of legislation (relatively unknown to most people) that I can remember. Not even on Social Security.