So, everybody seems to be all a-twitter over thisUSA Today expose. Have I lost my inner patriot if I don’t care, feel unaffected, don’t mind if the NSA looks at my incoming and outgoing calls, and think this is a ploy by USA Today to get some good p.r.? I mean, granted, by posting this I guess I helped them accomplish that goal. But I feel like this is not as big a deal as they want it to be, nor do I feel like my consitutional rights are being violated, nor do I feel like this is “breaking news.” Yawn. Discuss…
I couldn’t agree more… although I would point out that even if there are no constitutional rights being infringed upon, all of the statutory questions raised in response to the other NSA program are probably equally applicable here.
But it sure seems like USA Today, a news paper to wussy to risk offending our enemies by running the Danish cartoons, doesn’t really care whether terrorists have every last piece of information required to know how to escape our security measures: did they really have to tell every jihadist in the world that if they make their phone calls using Qwest, they’re safe from this program?
*completely inevitable, irrespective of the sitting Administration.
Seriously, Demo-cats, if you think President Hillary isn’t going to be data mining the “village” to, uh, find terrorists, then you might be the idiot in that village of diverse folks she described as necessary to raise a kid…
I love it, rather than condemning it for being wrong (which I think it may very well be) or trying to defend it on its merits, jazz harkens back to the same old GOP defense tactic of trying to claim that the democrats would do the same and/or did something wrong in the past too.
That’s brutal. Of course tapping phone lines is wrong! But its also likely a fact of modern life, as Andrew has pointed out previously.
Heck, you could even consider this a favor: as an opponent of Bush, its probably easier to make headway focusing on things that other politicians wouldn’t do/dare try, such as perhaps the intelligence fiasco pre and post-Iraq war.
Guys - remember that you do not have to prove that you have not caught H5N1 - you do not have to prove you’re clucking flu-less !
From an MSNBC report … “Instead it documents who talks to whom in personal and business calls, whether local or long distance, by tracking which numbers are called, the newspaper said. “
This ‘phone numbers called’ database doesn’t tell anyone who is calling whom ! It CANNOT do so ! What is can do, with a LOT of number-crunching, is pattern out which numbers are used to call which numbers, and at what times …
Absent the recording of the phone call itself, one cannot tell who made the actual call, nor to whom, necessarily …
So - BREATHE ! BREATHE ! and then, if necessary, get some H5N1 !
I think referring to this as tapping is a stretch. They’re gathering a database of what numbers have called what other numbers with what frequency and for what length of calls–the conversations are neither listened to nor recorded. Anyone familiar with Law & Order will be used to the concept of police obtaining the LUDs (local usage details) of a suspect with remarkably little evidence, though a court order is needed. Conceptually, this is the same thing on a larger scale without a court order. Whether that’s unreasonable search is a debatable point, but it’s not really wiretapping, so I’d rather we avoid the hyperbolic language.
Personally, I don’t much care if some governmental database maintains a record of how often I call various phone numbers. There’s no way they’d have the manpower to listen to even a substantial fraction of these calls, and determining the pattern of calls can markedly increase the probability of figuring out who to target for an investigation–when several people of whom you’re suspicious all make frequent calls to the same phone number, it may tip you off that this is something worth investigating. I don’t really feel my rights are being infringed here, any more than I worry about the DMV maintaining a record of who owns what vehicle and what the plate registered for that one is. If the police/FBI/whoever wants to use that database to narrow down their suspects, fine. To do anything more than figure out who is worth paying attention to, they still need to go through normal channels.
“I did a quick calculation: assuming that there are 200 million adult Americans, each of whom places or receives ten phone calls a day (a conservative estimate, I think), it would require a small army of 35,000 full-time NSA employees to pay a total of one second of attention to each call. In other words, lighten up: the NSA obviously isn’t tracking your phone calls with your friends and relatives.”
***
“[I]t’s interesting to juxtapose the NSA stories–this one plus the Agency’s international terrorist surveillance program–with this account of a report earlier today by Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee on the subway bombings in London last July:
‘The suicide bombers who killed 52 passengers on London’s transit system had a string of contacts with someone in Pakistan just before striking, Britain’s top law enforcement official said Thursday.’
‘However, authorities admitted they didn’t know what was discussed in those contacts and stuck with their contention that the blasts were a home-grown plot and that the degree of involvement by al-Qaida, if any, was unknown.’
‘Thursday’s report by the Intelligence and Security Committee concluded that intelligence agents had been alerted to two of the suicide bombers before the attacks but limited resources prevented them from uncovering the plot.’
‘Reid, speaking of the contacts in Pakistan ahead of the attacks, said authorities did not know what was discussed. *** “There are a series of suspicious contacts from an unknown individual or individuals in Pakistan in the immediate run-up to the bombings,” Reid said after his department released its narrative of the attacks. “We do not know their content.’
“Sounds like they should have listened in on those calls. These are exactly the kind of communications that are intercepted by the NSA under the terrorist surveillance program that has been widely denounced by Democrats.”
Sorry Mike but you are ignoring a couple of key details here. First its not JUST the numbers that are being kept track of but also the personal information about the number, who they are, where they live, etc. Those are details that are supposed to be private, unless and until an officer of the law obtains a warrant to obtain them. And when they do obtain the warrant, as laid out in the Fourth Ammendment it has to tell who and what is being searched, and there has to be probable cause that those records should be allowed to be searched. Now we could (and I hope that some do) have the debate about what constitutes probable cause, but in this case there isn’t even a shred of evidence being offered and the search includes millions of people who have not even been named let alone had any evidence presetned against them.
This is yet another example of what I have been saying all along. This President and his administration are moving us closer and closer to totalitarianism and/or dictatorship. While they might not ever put us there, the freedoms we are losing now are going to be hard to get back and that is just plain wrong. We have a group in power who feel that they are above the law, its an imperial Presidency and, to answer your question Kristy, yes you should be very very frightened.
To those who would try and defend this and claim its necessary in the war on terror fine, make your case. And if its sufficiently convincing then we change the laws and ammend the Constitution to make this a LEGAL behavior. What you can not, MUST not do though is sanction the behavior of this President, or any other who places himself above the law, not if you truly believe in freedom and what the Constitution stands for.
There is just no defense for this policy, and it is another in long line of behaviors by this administration that have shown they are interested more in power than in doing what is right.
And if you try and claim that the GOP controlled congress wouldn’t be issuing subpoenas and crying bloody murder if this was a Democrat in office doing this, then you are the worlds biggest liar or fool, take your pick.
so jose and i called the electronics boutique today. we wanted to know if there was any video game where one could be the trix rabbit and kill every kid who won’t let the rabbit eat some tasty f**king cereal. the guy at the store seemed pretty sure that the game didn’t exist. as a side note we did get him to admit that the whole rabbit/cereal situation wasn’t very fair. i hope the government didn’t hear that.
David, my understanding was that they were NOT collecting that detailed info (names, addresses, etc), ONLY the numbers called - to search for patterns. Though I imagine if they were to find a pattern, they would then take necessary action. Which, god willing, would be done properly with a court order.
Um, so your telling me someone’s number and address can only be aquired by court order? Only if its an unlisted number.
And no defense? Your telling me that what is being FREELY GIVEN, I repeat, FREELY GIVEN by the phone companies and does not provide any details of the conversation except for length is unreasonable simply to try and determine calling patterns for terrorist behavior? The IRS has more info on you than this database does.
And yes, I know it was freely given, because Qwest refused to give than information. And of course, now, because of the leak, any terrorist who reads USA today can say, “Hey, now I know which company to do my calling plan with!”.
So, in short, what privacy has been breached here? People’s conversations? No. People’s addresses? Not private. Sorry. Go check some web search engines to prove that. People’s phone numbers. Same.
then should i mention that yesterday jose and i called best buy looking for x-box’s: lucky charms II: ‘purple horseshoes; red balloons; blue moons and spinal fractures.’ tag: (they’re always after your lucky charms, and they’ll keep coming, until they’re all magically decapitated.)
David, Kristy’s right in that reports indicate that all that is being collected are numbers. From the initial USA Today article–which, amazingly, was the paper that broke the story:
“Q: Does that mean people listened to my conversations?
A: Eavesdropping is not part of this program.
Q: What was the NSA doing?
A: The NSA collected “call-detail” records. That’s telephone industry lingo for the numbers being dialed. Phone customers’ names, addresses and other personal information are not being collected as part of this program. The agency, however, has the means to assemble that sort of information, if it so chooses.”
So, this program is not actually keeping track of information such as addresses, etc., though it’s probably true that the agency could piece together that information from other sources. This procedure does appear to be in violation with section 222 of the Communications Act, but as that is merely a law the government breaking it is not necessarily acting contrary to the Constitution. If we’re going to debate probable cause, that’s all well and good, but we’ll also have to debate the word “unreasonable”. Do you really have a reasonable expectation of privacy that the number you dial on your phone isn’t available to others? Plenty of courts have ruled that anyone speaking on a cell phone or cordless handset doesn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy to the content of that conversation, given how easily such signals can be intercepted by even as innocuous of devices as baby monitors. I don’t see why the record of whether you made a call should have a greater expectation of privacy than the content of a conversation.
USA Today didn’t break the story. Wired! News did a report on a related lawsuit on this about a month ago and the Times did a story on it around Xmas eve last year.
Wait, ya don’t think its now new news again because of a certain military general involved with NSA wiretapping nominated for a CIA post?
Mike - Thank you for correcting the part about the personal information, I had read that line in the story wrong.
Lojo - We aren’t talking about them knowing who belongs to what phone number, we are talking about them having access to my call records, which yes are supposed to be kept private. I fault both the government for gathering this information without a warrant and the phone companies for providing it without a warrant.
And secondly, if you are trying to FIND calling patterns that resemble terrorists, how exactly does want get a warrant for that? Again, is getting someone’s phone records UNREASONABLE? Its not against the law, because the phone companies provided them willingly.
So your objection is that the government should not be able to have this information or that it is not reasonable for them to have this information?
Spending time, energy and resources to data mine calls that result in zero real leads is a much better way to stop terrorists from entering the country and detonating a WMD than, say, screening shipments into our ports or securing our borders.
Yes Lojo i believe based on the reports i have read that what the government and phone companies did IS illegal. And if you want to find those calling patterns you either get a warrant, which is currently as you said unfeasible, OR YOU CHANGE THE LAWS. Why is it so hard to grasp for people on your side of the aisle that when you don’t like the way a law currently restricts or allows things you can’t just ignore it?
Oohh, oohh . . . tell me more about the “long line of behaviors by this administration that have shown they are interested more in power than in doing what is right” . . . but type slow ;-)
OK - this may only make sense initially to those of us who share a phone line … single folk usually know that they are the only ones making calls on a specific phone line …
My house … me, wife, 4 daughters, and, for 3+ months each year, my revered and esteemed Mother … one landline which everyone uses … each month, phone bill arrives … lists all toll calls … from that record of calls made, for that one line, which of the SEVEN people made each call ?
Take that situation, scale up by 6 or 7 logs (factors of 10) …
Toss in that each kid and the two parents now have cell phones, and we still use whichever cell phone is handiest … usually our own, but, often enough, another family member’s cell phone …
Even if I was part of the McNostra clan, I would not be concerned about the “government” having access to those assorted phone bills … if anything, I have tremendous sympathy for whoever has to try to make sense of them as having any meaningful pattern … and, since both my side and the wife’s side have close family (biological and ‘adopted’) overseas, our phone number usages are probably part of what is being investigated … my father’s oldest suster died on Monday (age 93) - in England … so, for the next few days, lots of calls to the UK, including keywords like death, flights, burning, attacks (heart), and so on … none to known terrorists (that we know of, but who knows?) …
David - as you say, based on the reports you read, a lot of what the President does is illegal … then again, the sources for your reports don’t tend to publish corrections saying “Oops - turned out we made a mistake - it wasn’t illegal” cuz such a report would not be news - it’s SOP for the MSM …
So - am I being ‘irredeemably partisan’ or simply reality-based ?
“And I absolutey sanction this policy as completely defensible”
Except for the fact Bush has said repeatedly that NSA is not spying on Americans’ domestic calls, which apparently it is.
There are 2 million people who watch Fox News Channel. Two million people account for less than 1% of the U.S. population. Those 2 million people include Joe Mama, Alasdair, Lojo and Toni. They are on the fringe of society and live in a fantasy world where the government can’t be trusted with your tax money but can be trusted with your privacy. It is a bizarro world where Joe Mama is articulate, Alasdair has friends, Lojo has a mind of his own and people actual care what Toni has to ramble on about. It is the exact opposite of reality which, as we all know, has a liberal bias.
So please, do not be too harsh on these folks. They are technically retarded, but we don’t like to point that out to them too much because that would be cruel.
Projection: The attribution of one’s own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as a naive or unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt.
“The Beltway crowd has been on pins and needles for the past fortnightâ€â€?ever since the residents of Hanover, New Hampshire jotted on their jotters the 5/10/06 town meeting. The one that will live in infamy. Republican leaders were dreading the day; Democrats salivating over its promise. And this morning, the nation wakes up roiled; shaken and tattered and beaten to blue over the fateful tally that was taken last evening in Town Hall. Decisions have been made, and conclusions reached. Light has shone upon the face of the future, and the way has been made known. The residents of Hanover, New Hampshire have voted to impeach President Bush and end the Iraq War.”
Mike what kind of libertarian are you? I’m revoking your right to call your self as such… Until such time as you reject this program for what it is, an illegal and indefensible transgression against the right of citizens to privacy and to be free of warrant-less search and harassment at the hands of their government.
Unfortunately, far too many people just can’t wait and insist they know the future, when in fact their “predictions” are nothing more than their partisan hopes.
Dane, way to simply declare your argument correct without actually making it.
Sorry, but given how eminently sensible Mike is about pretty much everything, anytime you characterize something as “indefensible” which Mike has, in fact, just defended, I’m going to have to wonder about the strength of your argument.
Spending time, energy and resources to data mine calls that result in zero real leads is a much better way to stop terrorists from entering the country and detonating a WMD than, say, screening shipments into our ports or securing our borders.
I love the fallacy of Manichean dichotomies in budgets: “We’re paying for the NSA to illegally data-mine phone calls in search of terrorists, when they could be using that money to better screen ports!” Yeah, and we’re paying money in Social Security to retired billionaires when we could use that money to build a wall on our Southern border, too. So what’s your point? There are millions of lines of expenditures in the federal budget, so this line of reasoning is extremely specious.
My apologies, Lojo. One of the articles I read earlier today said that the USA Today had pbroken the story, and I accepted that at face value. Clearly, it was incorrect.
Dane, don’t be an idiot. For one, you have absolutely no right to say what I can and can’t call myself. [Internalize that, or I’ll revoke your right to call yourself intelligent. ;) ] For another, when actually given time to explain my political ideology, I typically call myself an independent who’s closer to libertarian than anything else. That’s still true. Hell, I could be a Libertarian and still hold the position that I do on this one, much as there are Pro Choice Republicans and Pro Life Democrats. People don’t need to hold every exact position which you would expect of an archetype to still fit in a general label. Or are you perhaps going to tell me that I can’t call hymself a nerd just because I enjoy playing multiple sports and do so on a regular basis?
You want to object to his as a “warrant-less search and harassment at the hands of their government”, show me how this is in any way harassment. I’m not sure I’d even call this a search–and even if it was one, I don’t necessarily feel that this level of search needs a warrant, any more than the police need a warrant to ask for a list of people who had access to a crime scene–but I can see how it could be viewed as one. They might well need a warrant to demand these records, but as one of the phone companies didn’t go along with the request and was apparently unharmed by this decision, then this is an issue to take up with the companies, not the government. But harrassment? You’ll have to explain that one.
Well first, what the government did is explicitly against the law. Passed some time ago that said the government needed a court order to get someone’s phone records. Hence Quest Communications refusal to comply. Second, big brother collecting information on every person living in this country without cause or justification seems pretty antithetical to the idea of libertarianism… Does it some how not?
Brendan, pay attention to what I said… I said the program is antithetical to the libertarian ideal… Which it is. The program is wholly indefensible as some how being libertarian. Seriously folks, this is another step down the road to 1984. And Mike, it would take an idiot not to see the dangers inherent in this. The more abuses of power we let go by the by the more abuses of power there will be… And lest we forget, there was absolutely no oversight on this one, no justice department check, didn’t even tell Congress. They just did it.
Again, this is an authoritarian abuse of executive power. It is obscene and Anti-American.
Just to make a small clarification. I am annoyed that the government did this, especially with how easy it is to get the records when you have cause. But what I find an obscene abuse of executive power is the method used to put the program in place. The unilateral decision to just do it. It begs the very serious question of what else has this president “just done” in a totally unilateral manner. Every time they get caught they say, well this is the end of it, until they get caught just a little further down the line, then that is the end.
By that token, Dane, I should be outrages that the government has information on me such as my address (for voting purposes); my height, weight, hair, and eye color (through the DMV and my passport); where I went to high school (for school funding), etc.
Libertarianism is a big tent, but the most overarching principle is that the government should be as small as possible to do what it needs to do. There are a lot of disagreements about what it is that it needs to do, but as far as I can tell that in generally encompassed in some notion of providing essential things which the citizens are unable to provide for themselves. That’s still open to interpretation, though. I like the government providing fire stations and public schools; some libertarians do not. This, I see as the government providing something entirely reasonable in terms of law enforcement powers. Particularly, as has been stated, because they asked for rather than demanded this info. I’d be up in arms about actually recording the conversations, but lists of phone usage details is hardly an infringement on my civil liberties. Similarly, I don’t have a problem with the police asking citizens at random if they’d be willing to be fingerprinted and have their DNA entered into a database to aid in any and all investigations. I’d probably refuse to participate myself out of principle, but I don’t have a problem with them asking, and with doing so for people who volunteer. Bottom line, anger at the companies agreeing to this without notifying their customers or wanting a court order seems far more reasonable to me than outrage against the government for asking.
Except they didn’t get a court order, and they had no reasonable suspicion of the entire United States Citizenry to warrant this. Beyond that, they broke the law in giving out the information without a warrant. The program showed no restraint and lacks necessary safe guards.
The simple fact is, it is antithetical to libertarianism to allow to government to run around willy nilly doing whatever it wants unchecked. And in this case the government is running around willy nilly gathering information unchecked. As I said the process is the stickiest part of this. Although this does also seem like an overly broad means to an end as well.
Gotta suspect that in the fine print that we each signed when we signed up for phone service, chances are that there’s a paragraph or three substantially saying “…and we will share your data at our discretion …” …
SBC says “Your local SBC telephone company may also be required to disclose CPNI for legal and regulatory reasons such as a court order, to investigate fraud or other unlawful uses of communications services.” {my bold}
The “such as” is such a wonderfully legalese weasel-phrase … “or” is another delightfully open-ended one, when in proximity with “such as” …
So - we get back to -
What would any of the D-list do different that would be better ?
And I reiterate, Dane, that this is not an example of the government running around doing willy-nilly whatever it wants unchecked. It asked for records, and was given them by most of the companies. The check is obvious in that one company didn’t agree to provide these records, and as far as I’ve seen that was the end of the matter with them. As I stated explicitly before: “Bottom line, anger at the companies agreeing to this without notifying their customers or wanting a court order seems far more reasonable to me than outrage against the government for asking.”
I don’t really mind a customer being upset by this–I think it’s a silly thing to be upset about, but people get to be upset about anything they like. I do mind when people get upset at the wrong people, as the culprit here to me seems to the be the company that forked over the records, not the person who asked for them.
Fundamentally, Dane, I don’t believe that you’re addressing the points raised by either Brendan or me. We’re not arguing whether this is illegal–we’re arguing that it’s not obviously and blatantly unconstitutional, and that we don’t really have a problem with a program like this existing, so perhaps the laws should be changed to allow it, if such changes are indeed necessary. You’re not so much responding to what’s being said as you are stating your viewpoint either a) without giving the reasons for that viewpoints, or b) confining it to a viewpoint we are expressly not arguing (such as the legality of this program).
The bombast in your speech doesn’t help much in the effort for you to be taken seriously, nor do your repeated statements that I don’t belong to a given group defined by beliefs because of my views on this issue when you don’t belong to that group yourself. I’d still have issues if, say, Sean tried to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to refer to myself as a libertarian in any way because of this, but at least he is one. You’re not, so the arrogance inherent in you saying that is even more grating. Do not presume to tell me that I’m not allowed to describe myself in certain ways as a general descriptor simply because I hold a view on a single issue which you think is contrary to overarching beliefs of that group.
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May 11th, 2006 at 1:53:55 pm
I couldn’t agree more… although I would point out that even if there are no constitutional rights being infringed upon, all of the statutory questions raised in response to the other NSA program are probably equally applicable here.
But it sure seems like USA Today, a news paper to wussy to risk offending our enemies by running the Danish cartoons, doesn’t really care whether terrorists have every last piece of information required to know how to escape our security measures: did they really have to tell every jihadist in the world that if they make their phone calls using Qwest, they’re safe from this program?
May 11th, 2006 at 2:06:37 pm
This latest development is
*shocking
*offensive
*troubling, and
*completely inevitable, irrespective of the sitting Administration.
Seriously, Demo-cats, if you think President Hillary isn’t going to be data mining the “village” to, uh, find terrorists, then you might be the idiot in that village of diverse folks she described as necessary to raise a kid…
May 11th, 2006 at 2:35:10 pm
I love it, rather than condemning it for being wrong (which I think it may very well be) or trying to defend it on its merits, jazz harkens back to the same old GOP defense tactic of trying to claim that the democrats would do the same and/or did something wrong in the past too.
May 11th, 2006 at 2:50:40 pm
Cmon David,
That’s brutal. Of course tapping phone lines is wrong! But its also likely a fact of modern life, as Andrew has pointed out previously.
Heck, you could even consider this a favor: as an opponent of Bush, its probably easier to make headway focusing on things that other politicians wouldn’t do/dare try, such as perhaps the intelligence fiasco pre and post-Iraq war.
May 11th, 2006 at 2:53:57 pm
Guys - remember that you do not have to prove that you have not caught H5N1 - you do not have to prove you’re clucking flu-less !
From an MSNBC report … “Instead it documents who talks to whom in personal and business calls, whether local or long distance, by tracking which numbers are called, the newspaper said. “
This ‘phone numbers called’ database doesn’t tell anyone who is calling whom ! It CANNOT do so ! What is can do, with a LOT of number-crunching, is pattern out which numbers are used to call which numbers, and at what times …
Absent the recording of the phone call itself, one cannot tell who made the actual call, nor to whom, necessarily …
So - BREATHE ! BREATHE ! and then, if necessary, get some H5N1 !
(SIGH)
(irritated grin)
May 11th, 2006 at 3:10:26 pm
I think referring to this as tapping is a stretch. They’re gathering a database of what numbers have called what other numbers with what frequency and for what length of calls–the conversations are neither listened to nor recorded. Anyone familiar with Law & Order will be used to the concept of police obtaining the LUDs (local usage details) of a suspect with remarkably little evidence, though a court order is needed. Conceptually, this is the same thing on a larger scale without a court order. Whether that’s unreasonable search is a debatable point, but it’s not really wiretapping, so I’d rather we avoid the hyperbolic language.
Personally, I don’t much care if some governmental database maintains a record of how often I call various phone numbers. There’s no way they’d have the manpower to listen to even a substantial fraction of these calls, and determining the pattern of calls can markedly increase the probability of figuring out who to target for an investigation–when several people of whom you’re suspicious all make frequent calls to the same phone number, it may tip you off that this is something worth investigating. I don’t really feel my rights are being infringed here, any more than I worry about the DMV maintaining a record of who owns what vehicle and what the plate registered for that one is. If the police/FBI/whoever wants to use that database to narrow down their suspects, fine. To do anything more than figure out who is worth paying attention to, they still need to go through normal channels.
May 11th, 2006 at 3:11:34 pm
“I did a quick calculation: assuming that there are 200 million adult Americans, each of whom places or receives ten phone calls a day (a conservative estimate, I think), it would require a small army of 35,000 full-time NSA employees to pay a total of one second of attention to each call. In other words, lighten up: the NSA obviously isn’t tracking your phone calls with your friends and relatives.”
***
“[I]t’s interesting to juxtapose the NSA stories–this one plus the Agency’s international terrorist surveillance program–with this account of a report earlier today by Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee on the subway bombings in London last July:
‘The suicide bombers who killed 52 passengers on London’s transit system had a string of contacts with someone in Pakistan just before striking, Britain’s top law enforcement official said Thursday.’
‘However, authorities admitted they didn’t know what was discussed in those contacts and stuck with their contention that the blasts were a home-grown plot and that the degree of involvement by al-Qaida, if any, was unknown.’
‘Thursday’s report by the Intelligence and Security Committee concluded that intelligence agents had been alerted to two of the suicide bombers before the attacks but limited resources prevented them from uncovering the plot.’
‘Reid, speaking of the contacts in Pakistan ahead of the attacks, said authorities did not know what was discussed. *** “There are a series of suspicious contacts from an unknown individual or individuals in Pakistan in the immediate run-up to the bombings,” Reid said after his department released its narrative of the attacks. “We do not know their content.’
“Sounds like they should have listened in on those calls. These are exactly the kind of communications that are intercepted by the NSA under the terrorist surveillance program that has been widely denounced by Democrats.”
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/014051.php
May 11th, 2006 at 3:21:13 pm
Eh, whatever. As Krisy knows, I already have a file with the FBI. What’s one more.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:13:31 pm
Sorry Mike but you are ignoring a couple of key details here. First its not JUST the numbers that are being kept track of but also the personal information about the number, who they are, where they live, etc. Those are details that are supposed to be private, unless and until an officer of the law obtains a warrant to obtain them. And when they do obtain the warrant, as laid out in the Fourth Ammendment it has to tell who and what is being searched, and there has to be probable cause that those records should be allowed to be searched. Now we could (and I hope that some do) have the debate about what constitutes probable cause, but in this case there isn’t even a shred of evidence being offered and the search includes millions of people who have not even been named let alone had any evidence presetned against them.
This is yet another example of what I have been saying all along. This President and his administration are moving us closer and closer to totalitarianism and/or dictatorship. While they might not ever put us there, the freedoms we are losing now are going to be hard to get back and that is just plain wrong. We have a group in power who feel that they are above the law, its an imperial Presidency and, to answer your question Kristy, yes you should be very very frightened.
To those who would try and defend this and claim its necessary in the war on terror fine, make your case. And if its sufficiently convincing then we change the laws and ammend the Constitution to make this a LEGAL behavior. What you can not, MUST not do though is sanction the behavior of this President, or any other who places himself above the law, not if you truly believe in freedom and what the Constitution stands for.
There is just no defense for this policy, and it is another in long line of behaviors by this administration that have shown they are interested more in power than in doing what is right.
And if you try and claim that the GOP controlled congress wouldn’t be issuing subpoenas and crying bloody murder if this was a Democrat in office doing this, then you are the worlds biggest liar or fool, take your pick.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:20:06 pm
so jose and i called the electronics boutique today. we wanted to know if there was any video game where one could be the trix rabbit and kill every kid who won’t let the rabbit eat some tasty f**king cereal. the guy at the store seemed pretty sure that the game didn’t exist. as a side note we did get him to admit that the whole rabbit/cereal situation wasn’t very fair. i hope the government didn’t hear that.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:28:35 pm
David, my understanding was that they were NOT collecting that detailed info (names, addresses, etc), ONLY the numbers called - to search for patterns. Though I imagine if they were to find a pattern, they would then take necessary action. Which, god willing, would be done properly with a court order.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:36:49 pm
David -
Um, so your telling me someone’s number and address can only be aquired by court order? Only if its an unlisted number.
And no defense? Your telling me that what is being FREELY GIVEN, I repeat, FREELY GIVEN by the phone companies and does not provide any details of the conversation except for length is unreasonable simply to try and determine calling patterns for terrorist behavior? The IRS has more info on you than this database does.
And yes, I know it was freely given, because Qwest refused to give than information. And of course, now, because of the leak, any terrorist who reads USA today can say, “Hey, now I know which company to do my calling plan with!”.
So, in short, what privacy has been breached here? People’s conversations? No. People’s addresses? Not private. Sorry. Go check some web search engines to prove that. People’s phone numbers. Same.
Where is the LEGITAMITE gripe here?
May 11th, 2006 at 4:45:32 pm
then should i mention that yesterday jose and i called best buy looking for x-box’s: lucky charms II: ‘purple horseshoes; red balloons; blue moons and spinal fractures.’ tag: (they’re always after your lucky charms, and they’ll keep coming, until they’re all magically decapitated.)
May 11th, 2006 at 4:46:17 pm
is that a pattern? i pity the government official that sat through that one.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:51:12 pm
David, Kristy’s right in that reports indicate that all that is being collected are numbers. From the initial USA Today article–which, amazingly, was the paper that broke the story:
“Q: Does that mean people listened to my conversations?
A: Eavesdropping is not part of this program.
Q: What was the NSA doing?
A: The NSA collected “call-detail” records. That’s telephone industry lingo for the numbers being dialed. Phone customers’ names, addresses and other personal information are not being collected as part of this program. The agency, however, has the means to assemble that sort of information, if it so chooses.”
So, this program is not actually keeping track of information such as addresses, etc., though it’s probably true that the agency could piece together that information from other sources. This procedure does appear to be in violation with section 222 of the Communications Act, but as that is merely a law the government breaking it is not necessarily acting contrary to the Constitution. If we’re going to debate probable cause, that’s all well and good, but we’ll also have to debate the word “unreasonable”. Do you really have a reasonable expectation of privacy that the number you dial on your phone isn’t available to others? Plenty of courts have ruled that anyone speaking on a cell phone or cordless handset doesn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy to the content of that conversation, given how easily such signals can be intercepted by even as innocuous of devices as baby monitors. I don’t see why the record of whether you made a call should have a greater expectation of privacy than the content of a conversation.
May 11th, 2006 at 4:54:28 pm
Mike,
USA Today didn’t break the story. Wired! News did a report on a related lawsuit on this about a month ago and the Times did a story on it around Xmas eve last year.
Wait, ya don’t think its now new news again because of a certain military general involved with NSA wiretapping nominated for a CIA post?
Nah. That would be way to political and partisan.
May 11th, 2006 at 5:03:58 pm
I assume that if that illegal wiretapping had not taken place previously, someone would have had the dime-store sense to yell ’slippery slope’.
May 11th, 2006 at 5:09:56 pm
Mike - Thank you for correcting the part about the personal information, I had read that line in the story wrong.
Lojo - We aren’t talking about them knowing who belongs to what phone number, we are talking about them having access to my call records, which yes are supposed to be kept private. I fault both the government for gathering this information without a warrant and the phone companies for providing it without a warrant.
May 11th, 2006 at 5:28:09 pm
David -
‘who belongs to what phone number’
They have these things called phone books.
And secondly, if you are trying to FIND calling patterns that resemble terrorists, how exactly does want get a warrant for that? Again, is getting someone’s phone records UNREASONABLE? Its not against the law, because the phone companies provided them willingly.
So your objection is that the government should not be able to have this information or that it is not reasonable for them to have this information?
May 11th, 2006 at 5:59:02 pm
Spending time, energy and resources to data mine calls that result in zero real leads is a much better way to stop terrorists from entering the country and detonating a WMD than, say, screening shipments into our ports or securing our borders.
What a bunch of clueless fucks.
May 11th, 2006 at 6:03:30 pm
Yes Lojo i believe based on the reports i have read that what the government and phone companies did IS illegal. And if you want to find those calling patterns you either get a warrant, which is currently as you said unfeasible, OR YOU CHANGE THE LAWS. Why is it so hard to grasp for people on your side of the aisle that when you don’t like the way a law currently restricts or allows things you can’t just ignore it?
May 11th, 2006 at 6:15:11 pm
Yes, have we not suffered long enough under these imperial phone companies?!
Thanks, David. I needed a good laugh today. And I absolutey sanction this policy as completely defensible :-)
May 11th, 2006 at 6:16:35 pm
Oohh, oohh . . . tell me more about the “long line of behaviors by this administration that have shown they are interested more in power than in doing what is right” . . . but type slow ;-)
May 11th, 2006 at 6:30:12 pm
OK - this may only make sense initially to those of us who share a phone line … single folk usually know that they are the only ones making calls on a specific phone line …
My house … me, wife, 4 daughters, and, for 3+ months each year, my revered and esteemed Mother … one landline which everyone uses … each month, phone bill arrives … lists all toll calls … from that record of calls made, for that one line, which of the SEVEN people made each call ?
Take that situation, scale up by 6 or 7 logs (factors of 10) …
Toss in that each kid and the two parents now have cell phones, and we still use whichever cell phone is handiest … usually our own, but, often enough, another family member’s cell phone …
Even if I was part of the McNostra clan, I would not be concerned about the “government” having access to those assorted phone bills … if anything, I have tremendous sympathy for whoever has to try to make sense of them as having any meaningful pattern … and, since both my side and the wife’s side have close family (biological and ‘adopted’) overseas, our phone number usages are probably part of what is being investigated … my father’s oldest suster died on Monday (age 93) - in England … so, for the next few days, lots of calls to the UK, including keywords like death, flights, burning, attacks (heart), and so on … none to known terrorists (that we know of, but who knows?) …
David - as you say, based on the reports you read, a lot of what the President does is illegal … then again, the sources for your reports don’t tend to publish corrections saying “Oops - turned out we made a mistake - it wasn’t illegal” cuz such a report would not be news - it’s SOP for the MSM …
So - am I being ‘irredeemably partisan’ or simply reality-based ?
May 11th, 2006 at 7:19:40 pm
“And I absolutey sanction this policy as completely defensible”
Except for the fact Bush has said repeatedly that NSA is not spying on Americans’ domestic calls, which apparently it is.
There are 2 million people who watch Fox News Channel. Two million people account for less than 1% of the U.S. population. Those 2 million people include Joe Mama, Alasdair, Lojo and Toni. They are on the fringe of society and live in a fantasy world where the government can’t be trusted with your tax money but can be trusted with your privacy. It is a bizarro world where Joe Mama is articulate, Alasdair has friends, Lojo has a mind of his own and people actual care what Toni has to ramble on about. It is the exact opposite of reality which, as we all know, has a liberal bias.
So please, do not be too harsh on these folks. They are technically retarded, but we don’t like to point that out to them too much because that would be cruel.
May 11th, 2006 at 7:40:48 pm
Projection: The attribution of one’s own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as a naive or unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt.
May 11th, 2006 at 7:51:21 pm
Some more from Mad Max’s reality-based community:
“The Beltway crowd has been on pins and needles for the past fortnightâ€â€?ever since the residents of Hanover, New Hampshire jotted on their jotters the 5/10/06 town meeting. The one that will live in infamy. Republican leaders were dreading the day; Democrats salivating over its promise. And this morning, the nation wakes up roiled; shaken and tattered and beaten to blue over the fateful tally that was taken last evening in Town Hall. Decisions have been made, and conclusions reached. Light has shone upon the face of the future, and the way has been made known. The residents of Hanover, New Hampshire have voted to impeach President Bush and end the Iraq War.”
http://www.dartblog.com/data/005667.html
ROFL!
May 11th, 2006 at 8:53:11 pm
Mike what kind of libertarian are you? I’m revoking your right to call your self as such… Until such time as you reject this program for what it is, an illegal and indefensible transgression against the right of citizens to privacy and to be free of warrant-less search and harassment at the hands of their government.
May 11th, 2006 at 9:06:30 pm
Joe Mama-
I’m sure in 1972 there were a bunch of Nixon chronies laughing at Woodward and Berstein too. Time will tell.
May 11th, 2006 at 10:15:45 pm
“Time will tell.”
Now that’s the smartest thing you’ve said in quite a while.
May 11th, 2006 at 10:17:08 pm
Unfortunately, far too many people just can’t wait and insist they know the future, when in fact their “predictions” are nothing more than their partisan hopes.
May 11th, 2006 at 11:13:31 pm
Dane, way to simply declare your argument correct without actually making it.
Sorry, but given how eminently sensible Mike is about pretty much everything, anytime you characterize something as “indefensible” which Mike has, in fact, just defended, I’m going to have to wonder about the strength of your argument.
May 12th, 2006 at 12:57:16 am
Spending time, energy and resources to data mine calls that result in zero real leads is a much better way to stop terrorists from entering the country and detonating a WMD than, say, screening shipments into our ports or securing our borders.
I love the fallacy of Manichean dichotomies in budgets: “We’re paying for the NSA to illegally data-mine phone calls in search of terrorists, when they could be using that money to better screen ports!” Yeah, and we’re paying money in Social Security to retired billionaires when we could use that money to build a wall on our Southern border, too. So what’s your point? There are millions of lines of expenditures in the federal budget, so this line of reasoning is extremely specious.
May 12th, 2006 at 1:05:37 am
My apologies, Lojo. One of the articles I read earlier today said that the USA Today had pbroken the story, and I accepted that at face value. Clearly, it was incorrect.
Dane, don’t be an idiot. For one, you have absolutely no right to say what I can and can’t call myself. [Internalize that, or I’ll revoke your right to call yourself intelligent. ;) ] For another, when actually given time to explain my political ideology, I typically call myself an independent who’s closer to libertarian than anything else. That’s still true. Hell, I could be a Libertarian and still hold the position that I do on this one, much as there are Pro Choice Republicans and Pro Life Democrats. People don’t need to hold every exact position which you would expect of an archetype to still fit in a general label. Or are you perhaps going to tell me that I can’t call hymself a nerd just because I enjoy playing multiple sports and do so on a regular basis?
You want to object to his as a “warrant-less search and harassment at the hands of their government”, show me how this is in any way harassment. I’m not sure I’d even call this a search–and even if it was one, I don’t necessarily feel that this level of search needs a warrant, any more than the police need a warrant to ask for a list of people who had access to a crime scene–but I can see how it could be viewed as one. They might well need a warrant to demand these records, but as one of the phone companies didn’t go along with the request and was apparently unharmed by this decision, then this is an issue to take up with the companies, not the government. But harrassment? You’ll have to explain that one.
May 12th, 2006 at 9:11:40 am
Well first, what the government did is explicitly against the law. Passed some time ago that said the government needed a court order to get someone’s phone records. Hence Quest Communications refusal to comply. Second, big brother collecting information on every person living in this country without cause or justification seems pretty antithetical to the idea of libertarianism… Does it some how not?
Brendan, pay attention to what I said… I said the program is antithetical to the libertarian ideal… Which it is. The program is wholly indefensible as some how being libertarian. Seriously folks, this is another step down the road to 1984. And Mike, it would take an idiot not to see the dangers inherent in this. The more abuses of power we let go by the by the more abuses of power there will be… And lest we forget, there was absolutely no oversight on this one, no justice department check, didn’t even tell Congress. They just did it.
Again, this is an authoritarian abuse of executive power. It is obscene and Anti-American.
May 12th, 2006 at 9:18:30 am
Just to make a small clarification. I am annoyed that the government did this, especially with how easy it is to get the records when you have cause. But what I find an obscene abuse of executive power is the method used to put the program in place. The unilateral decision to just do it. It begs the very serious question of what else has this president “just done” in a totally unilateral manner. Every time they get caught they say, well this is the end of it, until they get caught just a little further down the line, then that is the end.
May 12th, 2006 at 12:03:59 pm
By that token, Dane, I should be outrages that the government has information on me such as my address (for voting purposes); my height, weight, hair, and eye color (through the DMV and my passport); where I went to high school (for school funding), etc.
Libertarianism is a big tent, but the most overarching principle is that the government should be as small as possible to do what it needs to do. There are a lot of disagreements about what it is that it needs to do, but as far as I can tell that in generally encompassed in some notion of providing essential things which the citizens are unable to provide for themselves. That’s still open to interpretation, though. I like the government providing fire stations and public schools; some libertarians do not. This, I see as the government providing something entirely reasonable in terms of law enforcement powers. Particularly, as has been stated, because they asked for rather than demanded this info. I’d be up in arms about actually recording the conversations, but lists of phone usage details is hardly an infringement on my civil liberties. Similarly, I don’t have a problem with the police asking citizens at random if they’d be willing to be fingerprinted and have their DNA entered into a database to aid in any and all investigations. I’d probably refuse to participate myself out of principle, but I don’t have a problem with them asking, and with doing so for people who volunteer. Bottom line, anger at the companies agreeing to this without notifying their customers or wanting a court order seems far more reasonable to me than outrage against the government for asking.
May 12th, 2006 at 1:57:13 pm
Except they didn’t get a court order, and they had no reasonable suspicion of the entire United States Citizenry to warrant this. Beyond that, they broke the law in giving out the information without a warrant. The program showed no restraint and lacks necessary safe guards.
The simple fact is, it is antithetical to libertarianism to allow to government to run around willy nilly doing whatever it wants unchecked. And in this case the government is running around willy nilly gathering information unchecked. As I said the process is the stickiest part of this. Although this does also seem like an overly broad means to an end as well.
May 12th, 2006 at 1:58:02 pm
Oh yeah, and did I mention that the information was not obtained voluntarily (from the consumers) and was done wholly without their knowledge.
May 12th, 2006 at 3:27:53 pm
Gotta suspect that in the fine print that we each signed when we signed up for phone service, chances are that there’s a paragraph or three substantially saying “…and we will share your data at our discretion …” …
SBC says “Your local SBC telephone company may also be required to disclose CPNI for legal and regulatory reasons such as a court order, to investigate fraud or other unlawful uses of communications services.” {my bold}
The “such as” is such a wonderfully legalese weasel-phrase … “or” is another delightfully open-ended one, when in proximity with “such as” …
So - we get back to -
What would any of the D-list do different that would be better ?
May 12th, 2006 at 8:22:13 pm
And I reiterate, Dane, that this is not an example of the government running around doing willy-nilly whatever it wants unchecked. It asked for records, and was given them by most of the companies. The check is obvious in that one company didn’t agree to provide these records, and as far as I’ve seen that was the end of the matter with them. As I stated explicitly before: “Bottom line, anger at the companies agreeing to this without notifying their customers or wanting a court order seems far more reasonable to me than outrage against the government for asking.”
I don’t really mind a customer being upset by this–I think it’s a silly thing to be upset about, but people get to be upset about anything they like. I do mind when people get upset at the wrong people, as the culprit here to me seems to the be the company that forked over the records, not the person who asked for them.
Fundamentally, Dane, I don’t believe that you’re addressing the points raised by either Brendan or me. We’re not arguing whether this is illegal–we’re arguing that it’s not obviously and blatantly unconstitutional, and that we don’t really have a problem with a program like this existing, so perhaps the laws should be changed to allow it, if such changes are indeed necessary. You’re not so much responding to what’s being said as you are stating your viewpoint either a) without giving the reasons for that viewpoints, or b) confining it to a viewpoint we are expressly not arguing (such as the legality of this program).
The bombast in your speech doesn’t help much in the effort for you to be taken seriously, nor do your repeated statements that I don’t belong to a given group defined by beliefs because of my views on this issue when you don’t belong to that group yourself. I’d still have issues if, say, Sean tried to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to refer to myself as a libertarian in any way because of this, but at least he is one. You’re not, so the arrogance inherent in you saying that is even more grating. Do not presume to tell me that I’m not allowed to describe myself in certain ways as a general descriptor simply because I hold a view on a single issue which you think is contrary to overarching beliefs of that group.