NSA phone database controversy - Page 2 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

aceventura3 · 05-12-2006, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seaver

It's illegal and needs to be stopped. No IFs, ANDs or BUTs.

I supported Bush during the incident of recording international calls because they can be justified as intercepting foreign communications (or spying).

The internal US citizen-to-citizen tapping requires a warrant according to law. The NSA has no right to record such conversations according to Illegal Search and Seizure.

They are not recording the conversations. They are not listening to the conversations. All they did was obtain the records of calls made. The phone companies voluntarily gave those records. Where is the illegal part? I must be an idiot, because I simply don't understand how the NSA violated the law, or anyone's "right to privacy".

The_Jazz · 05-12-2006, 01:19 PM

roachboy, I read that article this morning, and I happen to agree with Qwest's lawyers. However, they're in the minority here, but I'm not sure what laws govern the privacy of phone records. They may be sacrosact until the appearance of a warrant, but I don't really know.

Rekna · 05-12-2006, 01:29 PM

For those of you claiming that the government only has annonymous numbers grab your home phone number and type it into google and see what you get back. This doesn't work for all numbers but any numbers that appear in phonebooks it does (ie no cell phones).

I would feel better about this if the phone companies didn't give them the phone numbers and instead only gave them unique ID's for who was calling who and the government had to get warrents in order to determine which ID belonged to which phone number but even that is iffy.

maximusveritas · 05-12-2006, 01:39 PM

The funniest thing about this is listening to them try to defend it. Lott actually asked the question "Do we want security ... or do we want to get in a twit about our civil libertarian rights?" Wow. I won't even bother quoting Ben Franklin on this one. It's just too easy.

You know, I acutally didn't think it was a big deal when I first heard about it, but now I'm convinced they're doing something wrong. The more desperate their attempts to defend themselves become, the more guilty they must be.

aceventura3 · 05-12-2006, 01:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jimellow

The article states otherwise.
Warrants are required as per the ruling highlighted above. In this case, Bush used his executive power to bypasss such requirements; and I question how he is able to justify such a decision to be "lawful and necessary."

I think there is a newer version of the law. In 1934 they were using switch board operators. If the phone companies violated the law, it should be a simple matter for a lawsuit to be filed and a cease and desist order issued. If this happens I stand corrected. However...

Today when I place a call I assume my call is being identified by the reciever of the call, anyone with access to the receiving phone knows my number, its in the public relm. Phone companies presumed everyones willingness to have their phone numbers published in directories with identifying information like name and adrress. Do those things violate privacy? If you use a wireless phone do you assume privacy, when people can make or purchase equipment to pick up thos calls? When you call 911, there is no court order but government traces nd records the call, is that a violation of privacy?

If we have a problem - it should be with the phone company not the NSA.

host · 05-12-2006, 02:54 PM

Goooodnesss!!!! The Republican Party [edited for abrasive content. It is one thing to posit that the Republicans are behaving in a facist manner, it is quite another to say they are facist.] is working O.T . to spin this new crisis away from themselves and onto democratric party members:

Quote:

http://www.rnc.org/

Latest Headlines
05.12.06 - The Real Dem Agenda: Cut and Run

05.11.06 - The Real Dem Agenda: Obstruct Qualified Judges

05.11.06 - Democrat Ethics Breakdown: News For The Week Of May 8, 2006

http://www.rnc.org/News/Read.aspx?ID=6313
THE REAL DEM AGENDA:

STOP TERRORIST SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM

Dems Put Politics First, National Security Second

_____________________________________________________________

72 House Democrats Filed A Motion To Stop The Terrorist Surveillance Program:

"[C]ongressman John Conyers, Jr. [D-MI] And 71 Other Representatives Filed Papers Seeking To End The President's Warrantless Eavesdropping Program." (Rep. Conyers, "Conyers And 71 Other Members File To Stop Warrantless Wiretapping Program," Press Release, 5/11/06)

*
"The Members Filed An Amicus Brief In Two Federal Courts Reviewing Challenges To The National Security Agency's Warrantless Wiretapping Program." (Rep. Conyers, "Conyers And 71 Other Members File To Stop Warrantless Wiretapping Program," Press Release, 5/11/06)

Democrat House Leaders Introduced Legislation To Weaken Terrorist Surveillance Program:

"Reps. Jane Harman (D-CA) And John Conyers (D-MI) Today Introduced The 'Lawful Intelligence And Surveillance Of Terrorists In An Emergency By NSA Act' (The LISTEN Act)." (Reps. Harman and Conyers, "Harman And Conyers Introduce Legislation To Force President's Entire Domestic Surveilance Program To Comply With The Law," Press Release, 5/11/06)

* Rep. Conyers: "This legislation could not be more timely. Today's USA Today article made clear that the Administration's eavesdropping is larger than anyone imagined and sweeps in the activities of millions of innocent Americans." (Reps. Harman and Conyers, "Harman And Conyers Introduce Legislation To Force President's Entire Domestic Surveilance Program To Comply With The Law," Press Release, 5/11/06)

Senate Democrats Put Politics First, National Security Second And Attacked The Terrorist Surveillance Program:

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV): "Today's press report that the government may be secretly collecting phone call records on millions of ordinary Americans is the latest example of why congressional oversight is so critical." (Sen. Reid, "Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid Released The Following Statement On Today's Press Report On The NSA's Collection Of Phone Records," Press Release, 5/11/06)

Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT): "Those entrusted with great power have a duty to answer to Americans what they are doing." (Laurie Kellman, "Lawmakers Question Government Collection Of Americans' Phone Call Records," The Associated Press, 5/11/06)

* "'It's Our Government, Our Government!' [Sen. Leahy] Said, Turning Red In The Face And Waving A Copy Of USA Today. 'It's Not One Party's Government, It's America's Government!'" (John O'Neil, "Bush Says U.S. Spying Is Not Widespread," The New York Times, 5/11/06)

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI): "This Administration's arrogance and abuse of power should concern all Americans. ... Congress needs to find out exactly what the Administration is doing and whether it is legal." (Sen. Feingold, "Statement Of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold On The Reported Massive NSA Database Of Americans' Phone Calls," Press Release, 5/11/06)

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL): "We need more. We need to take this seriously, more seriously than some other matters that might come before the committee because our privacy as American citizens is at stake." (Laurie Kellman, "Lawmakers Question Government Collection Of Americans' Phone Call Records," The Associated Press, 5/11/06)

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA): "[T]he NSA isn't just listening to international calls but is collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans who aren't suspected of wrong-doing." (Sen. Kerry, Remarks At American University, Washington, D.C., 5/11/06)

Senators Have Been Briefed On The Program And Assert It Is Legal:......

From the other side:

Quote:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200605120014#2

.............Richard Morin strikes again; skewed Post poll offers misleading support for NSA call monitoring

The Washington Post continues <a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200604150001#3">its long history of highly questionable polling practices</a> under the leadership of polling director Richard Morin, rushing to print the results of a hasty and poorly worded poll question about the Bush administration's monitoring of Americans' phone calls.

On Friday morning, the Post <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_nsa_051206.htm">reported</a> the results of a poll that it conducted over only one evening, just hours after the call-tracking program was first revealed to the American people. As if the timing and duration of the poll weren't reason enough to be skeptical about its results, the question itself was worded in a way that must have pleased White House senior adviser Karl Rove:

It's been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

The Post twice asserted that the purpose of the program is to fight terrorism. Aside from the fact that playing up the purported anti-terrorism purpose of the program was likely to influence respondents, the Post simply had no basis for this assertion -- other than the word of the Bush administration.

The only reason to believe the call monitoring is used only to fight terrorism is that the Bush administration says so -- the same administration that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the same administration that said it was monitoring only international calls of suspected terrorists. Not exactly the most credible people you'll ever encounter. On the other hand, we've seen credible reports that <a href="http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/2/6/1628/90153">the administration is spying on Bush critics and war protestors.</a> Interestingly, Hayden, who played a key role in developing and implementing the Bush domestic spying operation, has <a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200605080011">twice refused</a> to explicitly say that the administration is not spying on political opponents..............

How much imagination does it take to understand and be very dismayed about the potential for abuse and repression that this obsessively partisan and secretive administration might be capable of, using the phone bill data it has perusaded the telcos to hand over to it.

If war breaks out with Iran, or is seriously contemplated, how about a list of phone numbers of Americans who make or receive frequent calls to or from those Americans of Iranian descent who live in the U.S., singled out by the calls that they make to and receive from Iran?

How about a search that reults in lists of names and addresses of all those who call the NRA, or gun or ammo dealers? How about a list of all the folks who make and receive calls from the first group who are known to call the NRA or gun and ammo dealers? It's an easy way to make lists of homes to search first when and if 2nd amendment rights are suspended....

How about searches to find out who makes and receives frequent calls to M&A houses, like Goldman Sachs....who is suddenly talking frequently to Sachs M&A department...without warrants for these searches issued by a judge, even members of a trustworty and ethical executive branch, in a restored climate of 2 party, 3 branch "checks and balances" could be tempted to use the database to illegal or unfair financial advantage....

How about Sen. Russ Feingold? He called for a censure resolution of president Bush. Who is he calling frequently? Can we blackmail him into capitulation with knowledge of his calling and receipt of calls, patterns?

Who were John Kerry's most influential advisors and potential cabinet picks....say....one month before the 2004 presidential election? Who was Kerry talking to less or mor frequently than in September, 2004, Who did he stop talking to...have briefer or longer conversations with? Was he talking to anyone new?
Did he make any calls to numbers that might be spun as embarassing or difficult to explain, if the press was informed discretely.

C'mon...even die hard...."nothing to see here", reflexively supportive, terror fightin' folks who give Bush & co. every benefit of a doubt, must be able to sift through the potential for abuse when judicial oversight of phone number search requests are removed! Do you really believe that this secretive group at NSA and in the executive branch have had the entire depth and breadth of their unlawful activities totally exposed by the press?

If you still advocate for this? When would you object to it? It may already be too late to turn this back and hold these abusers accountable, now. Will it be easier on some future date, when you decide to object to it?

roachboy · 05-12-2006, 04:46 PM

i found this blog thing posted to the washington post to be interesting....

Quote:

William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security
Telephone Records are just the Tip of NSA's Iceberg

The National Security Agency and other U.S. government organizations have developed hundreds of software programs and analytic tools to "harvest" intelligence, and they've created dozens of gigantic databases designed to discover potential terrorist activity both inside the United States and overseas.

These cutting edge tools -- some highly classified because of their functions and capabilities -- continually process hundreds of billions of what are called "structured" data records, including telephone call records and e-mail headers contained in information "feeds" that have been established to flow into the intelligence agencies.

The multi-billion dollar program, which began before 9/11 but has been accelerated since then. Well over 100 government contractors have participated, including both small boutique companies whose products include commercial off-the-shelf software and some of the largest defense contractors, who have developed specialized software and tools exclusively for government use.

USA Today provided a small window into this massive intelligence community program by reporting yesterday that the NSA was collecting and analyzing millions of telephone call records.

The call records are "structured data," that is, information maintained in a standardized format that can be easily analyzed by machine programs without human intervention. They're different from intercepts of actual communication between people in that they don't contain the "content" of the communications -- content that the Supreme Court has ruled is protected under the Fourth Amendment. You can think of call records as what's outside the envelope, as opposed to what's on the inside.

Once collected, the call records and other non-content communication are being churned through a mind boggling network of software and data mining tools to extract intelligence. And this NSA dominated program of ingestion, digestion, and distribution of potential intelligence raises profound questions about the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans.

Although there is no evidence that the harvesting programs have been involved in illegal activity or have been abused to reach into the lives of innocent Americans, their sheer scope, the number of "transactions" being tracked, raises questions as to whether an all-seeing domestic surveillance system isn't slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able to reveal the interactions of any targeted individual in near real time.

In late November 1998, the intelligence community and the Department of Defense established the Advanced Research and Development Activity in Information Technology (ARDA), a government consortium charged with incubating and developing "revolutionary" research and development in the field of intelligence processing.

The Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) agreed to establish, as a component of the NSA, an organizational unit to carry out the functions of ARDA, overseeing the research program of the CIA, DIA, National Reconnaissance Office, and other defense and civilian intelligence agencies.

Beginning before 9/11, ARDA established an "information exploitation" program to fund and focus private research on operationally-relevant problems of exploiting the increasing torrents of digital data available to the intelligence community. Even with thousands of analysts, NSA and other agencies were falling behind in their ability to handle the volume of incoming material. Existing mainframe machine aided processes were also falling behind advances in information processing, particularly as the cost of computing power dramatically declined in the 1990s.

The information exploitation research program has funded hundreds of projects to find better ways to "pull" information, "push" information, and "navigate" and visualize information once assembled.

Pulling information refers to the ability of supported analysts to have question and answer capabilities. Starting with a known requirement, an analyst could submit questions to a Q&A system which in turn would "pull" the relevant information out of multiple data sources and repositories. NSA is seeking a Q&A system that can operate autonomously to interpret "pulled" information and provide automatic responses back to the analysts with little additional human intervention.

Pushing information refers to the software tools that would "blindly" and without supervision push intelligence to analysts even if they had not asked for the information. Research has sought to go beyond current data mining of "structured" records deeper profiling of massive unstructured data collections. Under the pushing information research thrust companies have been involved in efforts to uncover previously undetected patterns of activity from massive data sets. Software and tools are also being developed that will provide alerts to analysts when changes occur in newly arrived, but unanalyzed massive data collections, such as telephone records.

The effort to navigate and visualize information seeks to develop analytic tools that will allow agency analysts to take hundreds or even thousands of small pieces of information and automatically create a tailored and logical "picture" of that information. Using visualization tools and techniques, intelligence analysts are constantly seeking out previously unknown links and connections between individual pieces of information.

Intelligence community efforts to process "structured" data includes data-tagged signals intelligence (SIGINT) monitoring of telephone and radio communications, imagery, human intelligence reporting, and "open-source" commercial data, including news media reporting. "Unstructured" data includes news and Internet video and audio and document exploitation.

I could write volumes about the research efforts and the software programs and tools used to process the mountains of information the NSA and other agencies ingest. No doubt over the coming days and weeks, more will be written. For today though, I provide a pointer, based upon my research, of software, tools and intelligence databases that I have been able to identify in government documents relating to data mining, link analysis, and ingestion, digestion, and distribution of intelligence. My hope would be that other journalists and researchers will follow the leads.

source: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/early...the.html#20161

Jack1.0 · 05-12-2006, 06:16 PM

I know that people are frightened of the loss of privacy that they think this represents but I have to wonder if people realize what is at stake here. Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda are trying to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and they want to detonate these weapons inside America where the casualties could be MILLIONS of DEATHS.

I don’t care if the NSA discovers that I only call my mother twice a month, if they can track and discover a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in LA, New York, or Atlanta. How many TFP’rs do we know that live in or near these prime targets?

Unfortunately now the press has show the terrorists the phone company to change to if they don't want to have their calling patterns analyzed.

rainheart · 05-12-2006, 07:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jack1.0

I know that people are frightened of the loss of privacy that they think this represents but I have to wonder if people realize what is at stake here. Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda are trying to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and they want to detonate these weapons inside America where the casualties could be MILLIONS of DEATHS.

I don’t care if the NSA discovers that I only call my mother twice a month, if they can track and discover a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in LA, New York, or Atlanta. How many TFP’rs do we know that live in or near these prime targets?

Unfortunately now the press has show the terrorists the phone company to change to if they don't want to have their calling patterns analyzed.

What you are saying is quite circular.

You imply that the ends justify the means when you say that allowing the government to compromise our freedoms for the sake of security is O.K.

But, what is a terrorist?
If the government was in fact too oppressive, wouldn't I then be justified in using means that could be defined as "terrorist" to achieve my ends: liberty?

You must understand that both terrorist groups who truly despise democratic organizations, and government administrations who truly despise democratic organizations- they are effectively throwning us into this vicious circle to prevent us from ever acquiring liberty.

But this would require you to put aside your preconceptions for a moment here and, just for a split second, accept such a premise. If nothing, it's definately at least the most interesting dillema I've ever come across, wouldn't you agree?

host · 05-12-2006, 07:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jack1.0

I know that people are frightened of the loss of privacy that they think this represents but I have to wonder if people realize what is at stake here. Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda are trying to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and they want to detonate these weapons inside America where the casualties could be MILLIONS of DEATHS.

I don’t care if the NSA discovers that I only call my mother twice a month, if they can track and discover a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in LA, New York, or Atlanta. How many TFP’rs do we know that live in or near these prime targets?

Unfortunately now the press has show the terrorists the phone company to change to if they don't want to have their calling patterns analyzed.

Are the NY Times & USA Today reporters and editors who publicly reported the warrantless NSA domestic wire tapping and the telephone company secret handover of our private phone call billing records to the NSA, the U.S.government employees who leaked the details to the newspapers, and VP Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who leaked the name of a classified CIA operative to news reporters, all helping the "bad people"?

They must all really hate America.

Now that the terrorists have been tipped off not to make phone calls, can we go back to having the government follow the law, and honor the 4th amendment requirement that judges review the evidence and issue search warrants where they deem government requests to be appropriate?

Since this crisis demands that we all trade our freedom for security if we have any hope of thwarting the terrorists, wouldn't a live feed video camera installed by and monitored by local police in every private home....just to make sure that none of us are sheltering a terrorist...or two....and brief, thrice weekly polygraph tests, administered to each of us, for convenience sake....by our mailman or at a table at the entrance to our Wal-mart, and on Sunday at our church......just to make sure that none of us are lying about not having any terrorist connections....be just the ticket to help president Bush seperate us loyal citizens from the bad people?

Elphaba · 05-12-2006, 07:49 PM

Stevo

Quote:

The article is misleading. Yes, you need a warrant to obtain phone records of an individual. But that is not exactly what is going on. There are no names/individuals attached to these numbers. It is nothing but a list of numbers. Its the same data you get in the mail every month. Do they need a court order to "obtain" the data and send you a bill? No.

Stevo, you are either naive or believe the rest of us are. I have read in today's papers that there are numerous public directories sorted by phone number or address. In fact, give me your phone number and I will find your name and address in my 2006 Cole Information Services Directory. If a reverse directory like this is available to the general public, why would you believe that this or something far more sophisticated isn't available to NSA?

If you doubt me... www.coleinformation.com

host · 05-12-2006, 07:59 PM

Post deleted.

If you wish to post satire, post it in Nonsense. It is not allowed in Politics.

host · 05-12-2006, 10:54 PM

'kay....fun time's over !

Does it strike anyone else as odd, that suddenly, just in the last couple of years, an advanced society like the U.S., which has a string of historic successes, setbacks, and remarkable comebacks, just can't seem to do anything right, especially in the areas of government management, military planning, software and electronic systems, except when partisan politics are involved?

Just for May 12, there are three dozen, MSM reports about flawed and insecure software or otherwise inoperable Diebold and Sequoia electronic voting systems, all over the country:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...16#post2061616

But...the NSA seems to have no problem with it's monitoring of our formerly anonymous activities and communications with it's new super secret and super capable date management and mining software and electronics!

FEMA management was packed with Bush's unqualified political cronies when Katrina struck New Orleans, and the disaster response and relief was incredibly slow, and inadequate....

Four years earlier...within 48 hours of a call for the republican party "faithful" to descend upon Florida to counter 2000 presidential election vote recount efforts, 700 congressional staffers, and other hopeful republican politcal patronage job seekers arrived to stage well organized, fake protests designed to intimidate local Florida polling officials and make it appear, in front of TV news cameras, that the atmosphere was chaotic in order to discredit efforts to re-count disputed ballots.
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...mi#post2048366

The invasion of Iraq went flawlessly, but securing order in it's aftermath, and managing the occupation and reconstruction of the country was a disaster.

The CIA recruited Saddam's foreign minister and it's analysts were skeptical of administration claims of vast WMD stockpiles and reconstituted WMD manufacturing programs. Ten visits to Langley by VP Cheney and disinterest in the "no WMD" claims of the "turned" Iraqi foreign minister, supported by the lies of the drunken and discredited single source, "curveball", turned things around. The CIA "got it". They were on board with views that complimented what the administration needed to invade Iraq.

Then came reform....Porter Goss as new CIA director and his handpicked #3,
Dusty Foggo. Now...the CIA is in shambles, Goss resigned after purging all the experienced covert section hands out of the agency, leaving it stocked up with loyal partisan hacks. Foggo resigned, too, and today his house and CIA office were raided by a joint DOJ, DIA, and CIA Inspector General taskforce, looking for evidence that Foggo took bribes in exchange for contracts awarded to his best friend and "Briber #1" in the Randy Cunningham indictments, Brent Wilkes.

K Street was transformed by republicans into a super efficient revenue in exchange for federal legislation, thanks to the teams of Delay, Santorum, and Abramoff. The lobbyists, like the ones for the oil and pharma industries, wrote the energy and medicare prescription legislation, every republican legislator who voted with Delay, received campaign funds and perks from Abramoff. This was a tremendously well managed, one party lobbying system that generated jobs for outgoing legislators and their former staffers.

No spending controls could be proposed in congress and passed. Only tax cuts favoring the rich and mushrooming federal deficits were achieved on the budget management side.

"Brownie", at FEMA, the fired Arabian horse judge who mismanaged N.O. relief, the man who Bush praised just a week before he dismissed him, proved to be no lesson learned or impediment to the one thing that Bush does right.

Rewarding incompetent political hacks with important jobs continued as usual:
Alice Fisher has no experience as a federal prosecutor. Julie Myers is Gen. Richard Myer's niece:

Quote:

http://www.law.com/jsp/dc/PubArticle...hub=TopStories
Chertoff's Wake
The DHS chief's coattails extend to the administration's highest levels

By Jason McLure
Legal Times
January 23, 2006

After a rocky year, things are looking brighter for some protégés of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

On Jan. 4, President George W. Bush granted a recess appointment to Julie Myers, making the 36-year-old former Chertoff chief of staff the head of Homeland Security’s 15,000-employee Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Just a day earlier, Alice Fisher, Chertoff’s former deputy at the Justice Department who now heads the DOJ’s Criminal Division, had been on national television touting the guilty plea federal prosecutors had extracted from Jack Abramoff......

........Some have had an easier time in their roles than others. Myers perhaps suffered the most by her association with the post-Katrina Chertoff.

Myers and Chertoff both worked on the Whitewater investigation; Chertoff was special counsel to the Senate, and later Myers was a junior lawyer in independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s office. After brief stints as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York and at the Treasury Department, Myers became Chertoff’s chief of staff in November 2002, during his tenure as assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ’s Criminal Division...........

........But when Chertoff returned to the Bush administration last year, he hadn’t forgotten Myers, who had job-hopped from Justice to the Commerce Department to the White House’s personnel office.

Her confirmation hearings couldn’t have come at a tougher time. It was Sept. 15, 2005, and the political winds stirred up by Homeland Security’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina were still blowing through Congress. Three days earlier, Michael Brown had resigned in disgrace as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Congress and the media were on the hunt for underqualified Bush administration cronies.

Myers fit the bill. Nominated to become head of the federal government’s second-largest investigative agency, Myers had virtually no experience in immigration policy and a thin record of management of any sort. (Myers was unavailable for an interview. A spokesman for her office issued a statement saying, “She has great respect for Michael Chertoff and is extremely proud of her work with him.” ) And it couldn’t have helped that the other DHS nominee before the Senate committee was Stewart Baker, an older and deeply experienced Washington lawyer and policy-maker who is now assistant secretary for policy at the department.

“I think we ought to have a meeting with [DHS Secretary] Mike Chertoff, either privately or publicly, to ask him why he particularly . . . thinks you’re qualified for the job,” Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) told Myers, with her parents, her fiancé, and her future in-laws looking on from the audience. Because based on the résumé, I don’t think you are.”

But Voinovich had hit on Myers’ ace in the hole. Chertoff would not only speak privately with Voinovich but, according to one of the senator’s aides, would play a key role in persuading the senator to back her nomination. When Bush bypassed the Senate to give Myers a controversial recess appointment over the holidays, there was nary a protest from the normally independent-minded Voinovich. “He believes she has the potential to be a good manager,” says Marcie Ridgway, Voinovich’s press secretary.

If Myers’ credentials aren’t impeccable, her connections certainly are. She is the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Upon taking the helm at the DHS, Chertoff tapped her then-fiance (now husband), John Wood, who was once an aide to former Attorney General John Ashcroft, to be his chief of staff.

But Myers is far from the only government lawyer whose career has taken off after working for Chertoff. There’s also Alice Fisher, who worked with Chertoff on the Whitewater investigation. After Fisher left the Senate committee, she joined Latham & Watkins, Chertoff’s old firm. She became a partner at the firm in 2001, just as Chertoff tapped her to become one of five deputy assistants at the Criminal Division...........

When there is a direct politcal, PR, or patronage quid pro quo, these folks never miss a beat. With everything else they (mis)manage, Haliburton, KBR, or some other connected corp, on their no-bid list of cleaner uppers and fixers is called in to make big profits from our money, often with poor performance and shoddy, or contaminated, or criminally marked up supplies and materials.

Things work when they want them to....and they don't want the e-voting machines to work. They intend for the november election to be enveloped in a chaotic climate similar to post invasion Iraq, and post Katrina Gulf coast. They can steal much more in that kind of climate.

Jack1.0 · 05-13-2006, 10:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

Since this crisis demands that we all trade our freedom for security if we have any hope of thwarting the terrorists, wouldn't a live feed video camera installed by and monitored by local police in every private home....just to make sure that none of us are sheltering a terrorist...or two....and brief, thrice weekly polygraph tests, administered to each of us, for convenience sake....by our mailman or at a table at the entrance to our Wal-mart, and on Sunday at our church......just to make sure that none of us are lying about not having any terrorist connections....be just the ticket to help president Bush seperate us loyal citizens from the bad people?

No, but I don't care if the government asks a phone company for a list of numbers that I have called.

Arguments don't have to rely on extremes. A rain drop does not mean that it will flood tonight. Giving up a list of numbers does not mean I am willing to put cameras in my home.

host · 05-13-2006, 11:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jack1.0

No, but I don't care if the government asks a phone company for a list of numbers that I have called.

Arguments don't have to rely on extremes. A rain drop does not mean that it will flood tonight. Giving up a list of numbers does not mean I am willing to put cameras in my home.

So...it isn't extreme for the government to ask the telcos to break the law, and then use the telephone numbers that it shouldn't have gotten from them in the first place, and "data mine" the database of telephone numbers, to find out whatever it secretly chooses to know. You don't care about the potential for the government to blackmail or harass political opponents or constitutionally protected dissidents, when the government learns who they are calling, when the contacts begin, how frequently they happen, how long they last....etc. You are unconcerned about the political party in power knowing who the opposition candidates are talking to....how often, and who the opposition's contacts are talking to, etc.

This is why warrants are required by law. When warrants are not obtained, there is no examination by an impartial judge as to how appropriate the request for the warrant is, how large the scope of the investigation is, when the warrant is obtained, the duration of the warrant authorization, the confines of who and what the warrant is authorized by the judge to search for, and no "chain of evidence" that can later be used in court, in a prosecution based on the evidence obtained via the warrant, can happen.

The current, warrantless method is unlawful, exempts folks who are Qwest telco customers, offers no safeguards that the data mining info won't be abused for political purposes, or in an illegal "set up".... calls can be made from or to a targeted opposition politician or dissident, from or to a phone number that, when disclosed, or leaked, will embarass the target, hurt his marriage, or his reputation with his employer. Examples are phony calls to or from a porno store, a brothel, even an old girlfriend, ex-wife, rival company, employment recruiter....are you starting to consider how warrantless searches can be abused???

The "camera in your home", installed and observed via local police, is no more extreme an idea, than the reality that USA Today disclosed. It's illegal. Why isn't the DOJ prosecuting the phone companies that the NSA persuaded to break the law?

Quote:

http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Sa...=1137836047737
Saturday, May 13, 2006
20-year-old law prohibits divulging phone records
Government can ask, but companies can't give data

LOS ANGELES TIMES

......The law does not make it illegal for the government to ask for such records. Rather, it makes it illegal for phone companies to divulge them.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 was passed when cell phones and the Internet were emerging as new forms of communication. Section 2702 of the law says that these providers of "electronic communications ... shall not knowingly divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber or customer ... to any government entity."

Companies that violate the law are subjected to being sued and paying damages of at least $1,000 for each violation for each customer. A lawsuit was filed yesterday against Verizon.

"It is simply illegal for a telephone company to turn over caller records without some form of legal process, such as a court order or a subpoena," said James X. Dempsey, a lawyer for the Center for Democracy and Technology in San Francisco.

The 1986 law "was Congress's effort to create a comprehensive privacy right and to apply it to all forms of electronic communications," said Dempsey, who was then a counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.

Kerr and Dempsey said that it is hard to analyze the legal situation because neither the Bush administration nor the phone companies has explained the legal basis for divulging the records. Under the law as written, "it looks like the disclosure is not allowed," Kerr said.

The Supreme Court and Congress have taken turns defining the privacy rights of Americans involving phone calls.

The Fourth Amendment forbids "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the government. But until 1967, a search generally was limited to the police entering a home.

That year, the court said that a government agent listening to a private phone call was the equivalent of a search. That ruling, in Katz vs. United States, required police and federal agents thereafter to obtain a search warrant from a judge before they wiretapped a phone.

Still, phone records are not the same as phone conversations, and the Supreme Court refused to extend the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment to a list of dialed phone numbers.

"We doubt that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the (phone) number they dial," the court said in the 1979 case of Smith vs. Maryland. This ruling gave the police freedom to obtain phone records without a warrant.

To close that loophole, Congress then enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act forbidding the phone companies from divulging phone records.....

Quote:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...tm?POE=NEWISVA
NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls
Updated 5/11/2006

.........One company differs

One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as "product" in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest's financial health. But Qwest's legal questions about the NSA request remained.

Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio's successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.

Jack1.0, your argument relies totally on an extreme. It is extreme to advocate for the government convincing the telcos to break the law meant to protect our privacy. It is extreme for the government not to prosecute the telcos when they break the law by disclosing our telephone billing records without a warrant.

Maybe you support the party in power, and the elected officials from that party. Maybe you won't support the ones from the opposition party who someday unseat them. Maybe you have nothing to hide...so...you don't care if this government knows who you call. Why does it follow that you are so willing to give your rights and my rights, protected by law....away?

The law was passed 20 years ago to protect all of us from the potenital of government abuse by a warrantless assault on our privacy, or by the telcos selling our billing records to a private party. You are indifferent if that law is broken, but you think letting the police put a surveillance camera in your house is extreme. I want the law upheld, I want the government to prosecute companies who break it. I want search warrants obtained when the law requires it. You don't mind if the government decides to ignore the law, sometimes, selectively, if it's a mild enough instance, for you. Who has the more extreme position, you...or me?

At what point, between the telcos illegally handing over your billing record to the NSA, and local police installing a surveillance camera in your home, would you draw, the line....object....as I'm objecting now....if not when the law is first reported to be broken, or ignored, by the government?

roachboy · 05-13-2006, 12:43 PM

interesting account of the backstory of this nsa farce. note the roles of cheney and addington armed with their essentially fascist legal doctrine concerning the unlimited power of the executive in the context of a "state of exception"---fascist because of its origin in carl schmitt...

the interesting thing in it is the centrality of the (self-evidently empty) category of "terrorist" in the cheney arguments. i would assume that in the actual debates, the term was given a series of putative contents. but not here.

hayden's role should in itself be enough to tank hs nomination, one would hope.

well that and the fact that the nsa lawyers themselves thought the move illegal.

Quote:

May 14, 2006
Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, May 13 ? In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet fully clear.

As the program's overseer and chief salesman, General Hayden is certain to face questions about his role when he appears at a Senate hearing next week on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Criticism of the surveillance program, which some lawmakers say is illegal, flared again this week with the disclosure that the N.S.A. had collected the phone records of millions of Americans in an effort to track terror suspects.

By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans.

As in other areas of intelligence collection, including interrogation methods for terror suspects, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Addington took an aggressive view of what was permissible under the Constitution, the two intelligence officials said.

If people suspected of links to Al Qaeda made calls inside the United States, the vice president and Mr. Addington thought eavesdropping without warrants "could be done and should be done," one of them said.

He added: "That's not what the N.S.A. lawyers think."

The other official said there was "a very healthy debate" over the issue. The vice president's staff was "pushing and pushing, and it was up to the N.S.A. lawyers to draw a line and say absolutely not."

Both officials said they were speaking about the internal discussions because of the significant national security and civil liberty issues involved and because they thought it was important for citizens to understand the interplay between Mr. Cheney's office and the N.S.A. Both spoke favorably of General Hayden; one expressed no view on his nomination for the C.I.A. job, and the other was interviewed by The New York Times weeks before President Bush selected him.

Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, declined to discuss the deliberations about the classified program.

"As the administration, including the vice president, has said, this is terrorist surveillance, not domestic surveillance," Ms. McBride said. "The vice president has explained this wartime measure is limited in scope and conducted in a lawful way that safeguards our civil liberties."

Spokespeople for the N.S.A. and for General Hayden declined to comment.

Even with the N.S.A. lawyers' reported success in limiting its scope, the program represents a fundamental expansion of the agency's practices, one that critics say is illegal. For the first time since 1978, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed and began requiring court approval for all eavesdropping on United States soil, the N.S.A. is intentionally listening in on Americans' calls without warrants.

The spying that would become such a divisive issue for the White House and for General Hayden grew out of a meeting days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush gathered his senior intelligence aides to brainstorm about ways to head off another attack.

"Is there anything more we could be doing, given the current laws?" the president later recalled asking.

General Hayden stepped forward. "There is," he said, according to Mr. Bush's recounting of the conversation in March during a town-hall-style meeting in Cleveland.

By all accounts, General Hayden was the principal architect of the plan. He saw the opportunity to use the N.S.A.'s enormous technological capabilities by loosening restrictions on the agency's operations inside the United States.

For his part, Mr. Cheney helped justify the program with an expansive theory of presidential power, which he explained to traveling reporters a few days after The Times first reported on the program in December.

Mr. Cheney traced his views to his service as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford in the 1970's, when post-Watergate reforms, which included the FISA law, "served to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in a national security area."

Senior intelligence officials outside the N.S.A. who discussed the matter in late 2001 with General Hayden said he accepted the White House and Justice Department argument that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to approve such eavesdropping on international calls.

"Hayden was no cowboy on this," said another former intelligence official who was granted anonymity because it was the only way he would talk about a program that remains classified the program remains classified. "He was a stickler for staying within the framework laid out and making sure it was legal, and I think he believed that it was."

The official said General Hayden appeared particularly concerned about ensuring that one end of each conversation was outside the United States. For his employees at the N.S.A., whose mission is foreign intelligence, avoiding purely domestic eavesdropping appears to have been crucial.

But critics of the program say the law does not allow spying on a caller in the United States without a warrant, period ? no matter whether the call is domestic or international. "Both would violate FISA," said Nancy Libin, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group.

Ms. Libin said limiting the intercepts without warrants to international calls "may have been a political calculation, because it sounds more reassuring."

One indication that the restriction to international communications was dictated by more than legal considerations came at a House hearing last month. Asked whether the president had the authority to order eavesdropping without a warrant on purely domestic communications, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales replied, "I'm not going to rule it out."

Despite the decision to target only international calls and e-mail messages, some domestic traffic was picked up inadvertently because of difficulties posed by cell phone and e-mail technology in determining whether a user is on American soil, as The Times reported last year.

And one government official, who had access to intelligence from the intercepts that he said he would speak about only if granted anonymity, believes that some of the purely domestic eavesdropping in the program's early phase was intentional. No other officials have made that claim.

President Bush and other officials have denied that the program monitors any domestic calls. They have, however, generally stated their comments in the present tense, leaving open the question of whether domestic calls may have been captured before the program's rules were fully established.

After the program started, General Hayden was the one who briefed members of Congress on it and who later tried to dissuade The Times from reporting its existence.

When the newspaper published its first article on the program last December, General Hayden found himself on the defensive. He had often insisted in interviews and public testimony that the N.S.A. always followed laws protecting Americans' privacy. As the program's disclosure provoked an outcry, he had to square those assurances with the fact that the program sidestepped the FISA statute.

Nonetheless, General Hayden took on a prominent role in explaining and defending the program. He appeared at the White House alongside Mr. Gonzales, spoke on television and gave an impassioned speech at the National Press Club in January.

Some of the program's critics have found his visibility in defending a controversial presidential policy inappropriate for an intelligence professional. "There's some unhappiness at N.S.A. with Hayden taking such an upfront role," said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and former N.S.A. analyst who keeps in touch with some employees. "If the White House got them into this, why is Hayden the one taking the flak?"

But General Hayden seems determined to stand up for the agency's conduct ? and his own. In the press club speech, General Hayden recounted remarks he made to N.S.A. employees two days after the Sept. 11 attacks: "We are going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again."

He said that the standards for what represented a "reasonable" intrusion into Americans' privacy had changed "as smoke billowed from two American cities and a Pennsylvania farm field."

"We acted accordingly," he said.

In the speech, General Hayden hinted at the internal discussion of the proper limits of the N.S.A. program. Although he did not mention Mr. Cheney or his staff, he said the decision to limit the eavesdropping to international phone calls and e-mail messages was "one of the decisions that had been made collectively."

"Certainly, I personally support it," he said.

President Defends Pick

WASHINGTON, May 13 (Bloomberg News) ? In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Bush defended the qualifications of Gen. Michael V. Hayden to be director of the C.I.A. and sought to ease concern about a domestic eavesdropping program that the general helped create.

In General Hayden, "the men and women of the C.I.A. will have a strong leader who will support them as they work to disrupt terrorist attacks, penetrate closed societies and gain information that is vital to protecting our nation," Mr. Bush said.

He urged the Senate to confirm the general "promptly.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/wa...rtner=homepage

Elphaba · 05-13-2006, 01:48 PM

I need to begin with a new premise when the latest scandal du jour arises. "This can only be a part of it; what else could they be doing?" Phone records and emails appear to be just the tip of the iceburg.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051306A.shtml

Quote:

Former NSA Officer Alleges Illegal Activities Under Hayden
By Chris Strohm
CongressDaily

Friday 12 May 2006

A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens.

Russell Tice, who worked on what are known as "special access programs," has wanted to meet in a closed session with members of Congress and their staff since President Bush announced in December that he had secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without a court order. In an interview late Thursday, Tice said the Senate Armed Services Committee finally asked him to meet next week in a secure facility on Capitol Hill.

Tice was fired from the NSA last May. He said he plans to tell the committee staffers the NSA conducted illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of U.S. citizens while he was there with the knowledge of Hayden, who has been nominated to become director of the CIA. Tice said one of his co-workers personally informed Hayden that illegal and unconstitutional activity was occurring.

The Senate Intelligence Committee plans to hold Hayden's confirmation hearing next week. "I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It's pretty hard to believe," Tice said. "I hope that they'll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn't exist right now."

Tice originally asked to meet with the Senate and House Intelligence committees, but they did not respond to his request. The NSA did not reply to written questions seeking comment for this story.

Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans.

"It's an angle that you haven't heard about yet," he said.

According to an unclassified resume, Tice was a specialist in space operations systems, command and control warfare, advanced technology and all-source collection analysis. During an 18-year career, he worked on some of the most secretive programs in the government.

Tice would not discuss with a reporter the details of his allegations, saying doing so would compromise classified information and put him at risk of going to jail. He said he "will not confirm or deny" if his allegations involve the illegal use of space systems and satellites.

Tice said he would raise concerns that illegal activity was occurring in electronic reports, but that his comments were deleted from those reports.

Tice was fired last May after the NSA ordered him to undergo psychological evaluations following a separate clash with agency leadership, and psychologists diagnosed him as being paranoid. Tice claimed the order to undergo the evaluations was retaliation for raising concerns. He also said he saw an independent psychologist who found no evidence that he has a mental disorder.

Hayden, on Capitol Hill Friday visiting with lawmakers, defended the secret surveillance programs he oversaw while head of the NSA as lawful and designed to "preserve the security and the liberty of the American people."

Hayden declined to comment on news reports about the NSA's database on private telephone calls, but spoke about the NSA's work in general terms, the Associated Press reported.

"Everything that the agency has done has been lawful. It's been briefed to the appropriate members of Congress," Hayden told reporters. "The only purpose of the agency's activities is to preserve the security and the liberty of the American people. And I think we've done that," he said.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said, "We're 100 percent behind Michael Hayden. ... There's no question about that, and [we are] confident that he is going to comport himself well and answer all the questions and concerns that members of the United States Senate may have in the process of confirmation."

SteelyLoins · 05-14-2006, 06:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by maximusveritas

The funniest thing about this is listening to them try to defend it. Lott actually asked the question "Do we want security ... or do we want to get in a twit about our civil libertarian rights?" Wow. I won't even bother quoting Ben Franklin on this one. It's just too easy.

You know, I acutally didn't think it was a big deal when I first heard about it, but now I'm convinced they're doing something wrong. The more desperate their attempts to defend themselves become, the more guilty they must be.

"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees."
- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993

One difference of note is that the current administration appears to be trying to look for terrorists, but when Clinton got 1,000 FBI files on Congressional representatives (of course, blackmail for voting a certain way was the furthest thing from his mind), nothing happened, and you barely read about it.

Of course, anything Clinton did is no longer relevant. It will be fun to use that "thinking" once Bush is out of office.

I'm mainly queasy about this because it sets a precedent for some future politician to misuse it for political gain.

SteelyLoins · 05-14-2006, 06:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rekna

For those of you claiming that the government only has annonymous numbers grab your home phone number and type it into google and see what you get back. This doesn't work for all numbers but any numbers that appear in phonebooks it does (ie no cell phones).

I would feel better about this if the phone companies didn't give them the phone numbers and instead only gave them unique ID's for who was calling who and the government had to get warrents in order to determine which ID belonged to which phone number but even that is iffy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elphaba

Stevo

Stevo, you are either naive or believe the rest of us are. I have read in today's papers that there are numerous public directories sorted by phone number or address. In fact, give me your phone number and I will find your name and address in my 2006 Cole Information Services Directory. If a reverse directory like this is available to the general public, why would you believe that this or something far more sophisticated isn't available to NSA?

If you doubt me... www.coleinformation.com

Those directories have been around for thirty years, at least. I used to use the "reverse directory" in the library; now you don't have to drive there.
If the information is already public knowledge, it's a little late to gripe about the government having it.

And yes, I know that's not the same as the phone company records of calls.

If you're really concerned, buy one of those phones that you buy minutes for at a grocery store, register it online at an internet cafe, and you're home free. It's cheaper, anyway--cheating spouses just love them.

SteelyLoins · 05-14-2006, 06:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elphaba

Stevo

Stevo, you are either naive or believe the rest of us are. I have read in today's papers that there are numerous public directories sorted by phone number or address. In fact, give me your phone number and I will find your name and address in my 2006 Cole Information Services Directory. If a reverse directory like this is available to the general public, why would you believe that this or something far more sophisticated isn't available to NSA?

If you doubt me... www.coleinformation.com

Great. Thanks for helping fund the companies that are responsible for all the junk mail and junk faxes I get.

SteelyLoins · 05-14-2006, 07:05 AM

Post deleted.

Retaliation is not the correct course of action. In future, please report to the mods.

hannukah harry · 05-14-2006, 07:32 AM

Post Deleted.

Please do not fan the flames.

host · 05-14-2006, 12:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SteelyLoins

"If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees."
- President Bill Clinton, August 12, 1993

One difference of note is that the current administration appears to be trying to look for terrorists, but when Clinton got 1,000 FBI files on Congressional representatives (of course, blackmail for voting a certain way was the furthest thing from his mind), nothing happened, and you barely read about it.

Of course, anything Clinton did is no longer relevant. It will be fun to use that "thinking" once Bush is out of office.

I'm mainly queasy about this because it sets a precedent for some future politician to misuse it for political gain.

SteelyLoins....the official historical record indicates that everything you posted about "when Clinton got 1,000 FBI files on Congressional representatives "is false, and/or misleading. The Starr report, displayed below, indicates that no criminal activity took place, that the matter was investigated by the office of special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr (investigated at the request of Attorney General, Janet Reno) and that the matter was investigated by congressional committee, "House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight". I personally recall watching Mr. Anthony Maresca testify before that committee, live....on TV.

Aside from the Plame CIA leak, there is no Special Prosecutor to investigate what the Bush administration has done, and there are no congressional committees investigating the Bush administration, aside from Sen. Pat Roberts penchant for delaying his two year old, "Phase II" pre-invasion Iraq intelligence handling.....by dividing and postponing his committees report, once again.

The contrast is glaring, today, SteelyLoins...no investigations by congress, no special prosecutor....vs. eight years of the Starr investigations against the Clinton administration, and $110 million expended. I guess that Clinton was just too smart for them, back then, huh? But it wasn't Clinton who was given a free ride....a pass. It is the current administration !

Quote:

http://www.oic-starr.gov/p000728b.htm
Press Release
Friday, July 28, 2000

Independent Counsel Robert W. Ray issued the following statement today:

The Special Division of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an order unsealing the Final Report regarding this Office's investigation In re: Anthony Marceca (commonly known as the FBI Files matter). On March 16, 2000, the Independent Counsel concluded that no prosecutions were warranted in the FBI Files matter and closed the investigation with the filing of the Final Report with the Court. The Final Report in the FBI Files matter is now available to the public as the result of the Court's action today.

The Final Report in the FBI Files matter concludes that there was no substantial and credible evidence that any senior White House official, or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, was involved in seeking confidential Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") background reports of former White House staff from the prior administrations of President Bush and President Reagan.

The Report reaches that conclusion after determining that the evidence was insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Anthony Marceca, a detailee to the White House Office of Personnel Security, made any knowingly false statements in connection with his requests for FBI background reports. According to the Report, Mr. Marceca represented that "access" was the reason for his requests for background reports from the FBI. The evidence established that that representation was false in hundreds of cases where Mr. Marceca requested the background reports of individuals who no longer required access to the White House. The Report concludes, however, that the evidence was insufficient to charge Mr. Marceca with making knowingly false statements because there was insufficient evidence that he ever asked for the background report of any individual knowing, before he made a request, that the individual no longer required access to the White House.

This conclusion rested upon this Office's analysis of the testimony of witnesses, in conjunction with computer records and physical evidence, which showed that Mr. Marceca requested FBI background reports using a list that did not distinguish between "active" and "inactive" passholders. The evidence regarding Mr. Marceca's use of the list suggested that Mr. Marceca did not target specific individuals to obtain their background reports. There was no evidence that Mr. Marceca contemporaneously sought to conceal his requests for the background reports of individuals who no longer required access to the White House. Mr. Marceca notified the supervisors in the former offices of the individuals whose background reports he had requested of the need for those individuals to obtain a new background investigation. Such notification suggests that Mr. Marceca did not request the background reports to collect derogatory information on political opponents of the current Administration.

Rather, it suggests that Mr. Marceca erroneously believed that the individuals whose reports he requested were still employed at the White House and needed access. Mr. Marceca's notations on certain background reports regarding suitability for continued employment at the White House also support the conclusion that Mr. Marceca did not know that the individuals whose reports he requested were no longer employed at the White House and did not need access.

The Report also cites the lack of supervision, training, and experience as factors that led to Mr. Marceca's requests for FBI background reports for individuals who had since left the White House. The sheer number of reports produced by the FBI to Mr. Marceca, according to the Report, should have raised concerns and prompted corrective action.

The Final Report also addresses Mr. Marceca's testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. The Report concludes that although portions of Mr. Marceca's testimony were false, the Independent Counsel declined to prosecute him because such a prosecution would not serve the purpose for which an independent counsel was appointed in this matter. Having concluded that no senior White House official, or Mrs. Clinton, was involved in obtaining FBI background reports, the Independent Counsel granted Mr. Marceca immunity to ensure full disclosure of all information relevant to the investigation.

The Final Report in In re: Anthony Marceca is available today at the main U.S. Government Bookstore at 710 North Capitol Street, N.W. in Washington, D.C. and online from GPO Access http://icreport.access.gpo.gov/, which also can be reached as a link from this Office's website www.oicray.com.

stevo · 05-15-2006, 05:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elphaba

Stevo

Stevo, you are either naive or believe the rest of us are. I have read in today's papers that there are numerous public directories sorted by phone number or address. In fact, give me your phone number and I will find your name and address in my 2006 Cole Information Services Directory. If a reverse directory like this is available to the general public, why would you believe that this or something far more sophisticated isn't available to NSA?

If you doubt me... www.coleinformation.com

So when did you give up your anonimity? Perhaps when you signed up for phone service, got a number, and had you information published. Or when the NSA got a list of the calls you made from your phone provider. Like Ace said, take it up with your phone company.

In addition - I probably have your phone number, I probably have 90-95% of TFPers' numbers, if their in america. Well, not I, but my business. So yes, I know you can link numbers to names and so forth.

Charlatan · 05-15-2006, 05:35 AM

This thread is closed.

It's too bad that some of you can't follow the rules.

05-12-2006, 01:19 PM	#42 (permalink)
The_Jazz Asshole Administrator Location: Chicago	roachboy, I read that article this morning, and I happen to agree with Qwest's lawyers. However, they're in the minority here, but I'm not sure what laws govern the privacy of phone records. They may be sacrosact until the appearance of a warrant, but I don't really know. __________________ "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin "There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush "We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

05-12-2006, 06:16 PM	#48 (permalink)
Jack1.0 Tilted	I know that people are frightened of the loss of privacy that they think this represents but I have to wonder if people realize what is at stake here. Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda are trying to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and they want to detonate these weapons inside America where the casualties could be MILLIONS of DEATHS. I don’t care if the NSA discovers that I only call my mother twice a month, if they can track and discover a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in LA, New York, or Atlanta. How many TFP’rs do we know that live in or near these prime targets? Unfortunately now the press has show the terrorists the phone company to change to if they don't want to have their calling patterns analyzed. __________________ Jack1.0 ---------------------------------------------- I've learned to embrace my inner Geek. I haven't found anything else I'm good at. Last edited by Jack1.0; 05-12-2006 at 06:18 PM..

05-12-2006, 07:59 PM	#52 (permalink)
host Banned	Post deleted. If you wish to post satire, post it in Nonsense. It is not allowed in Politics. Last edited by Charlatan; 05-15-2006 at 05:30 AM..

05-14-2006, 07:05 AM	#61 (permalink)
SteelyLoins Upright	Post deleted. Retaliation is not the correct course of action. In future, please report to the mods. Last edited by Charlatan; 05-15-2006 at 05:33 AM..

05-14-2006, 07:32 AM	#62 (permalink)
hannukah harry Junkie	Post Deleted. Please do not fan the flames. __________________ shabbat shalom, mother fucker! - the hebrew hammer Last edited by Charlatan; 05-15-2006 at 05:33 AM..

05-12-2006, 01:29 PM	#43 (permalink)
Rekna Junkie	For those of you claiming that the government only has annonymous numbers grab your home phone number and type it into google and see what you get back. This doesn't work for all numbers but any numbers that appear in phonebooks it does (ie no cell phones). I would feel better about this if the phone companies didn't give them the phone numbers and instead only gave them unique ID's for who was calling who and the government had to get warrents in order to determine which ID belonged to which phone number but even that is iffy.

05-12-2006, 01:39 PM	#44 (permalink)
maximusveritas Winner	The funniest thing about this is listening to them try to defend it. Lott actually asked the question "Do we want security ... or do we want to get in a twit about our civil libertarian rights?" Wow. I won't even bother quoting Ben Franklin on this one. It's just too easy. You know, I acutally didn't think it was a big deal when I first heard about it, but now I'm convinced they're doing something wrong. The more desperate their attempts to defend themselves become, the more guilty they must be.

05-15-2006, 05:35 AM	#65 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	This thread is closed. It's too bad that some of you can't follow the rules. __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke