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Posted by retcopper
 - May 15, 2006, 03:35 PM
Quote from: George W. Maschke on May 14, 2006, 11:34 AM

Those who don't mind their calling records being provided to the NSA because they like and trust George W. Bush should consider the possibility of their records falling under the control of a Hillary Rodham Clinton administration.

George:

Now THAT is a horrific thought.
Posted by NSAreject
 - May 14, 2006, 02:15 PM
All  terrorists would have to do, is purchase disposable
cell phones - that would put an end to this B.S...
Posted by George W. Maschke
 - May 14, 2006, 11:34 AM
Quote from: Skeptic on May 13, 2006, 06:12 PMI rather think it befits a small and shrinking minority of craven pro-Bush'ers who are concerned with power and party over country.  But you say potato, I say potahto...

Those who don't mind their calling records being provided to the NSA because they like and trust George W. Bush should consider the possibility of their records falling under the control of a Hillary Rodham Clinton administration.
Posted by NSAreject
 - May 13, 2006, 09:55 PM
Skeptic,

  Right on !  I am an ex-NSA'er, but with clearances from
other agencies.  I worked there for many years and I
am not one bit surprised at what is going on.  They have
thousands of databses full of USSID-18 violations and
don't even bother to purge the information, like they are
supposed to.  My Brother now works there and does
"data mining", probably of this illegal information - I
hope he is real proud of his mission - what a patriot !
NSA is an agency without boundries, due to people
without boundries (because of their backgrounds).
Never again, will I have anything to do with NSA - a
f'uped place to work, with f'uped people.

Good for Qwest, for not turning over their phone
records - if I can, I will be switching from Verizon to
Qwest...
Posted by Skeptic
 - May 13, 2006, 06:40 PM
One more comment to the NSA'ers who read this board: what your agency is doing is illegal.  You know it, and we know it.  The truth WILL come out (it already is), and those responsible and involved will go to prison.  NSA, an agency with a critical mission, will suffer further great damage to its reputation and possibly the ability to carry out even its legitimate activites.

Is it worth it?  In order to run a program that by all accounts has turned up pretty much nil in terms of actually stopping terrorists, is it worth it to run roughshod over the Constitution and laws all federal employees are sworn to protect?  Is your job worth being involved in such vile crimes against the American People?

The American People want to be protected.  But they're not the cowards you seem to think they are.  They care about the rights and the democratic traditions that make this country worth fighting for.  If you have respect and love for your country, how can you be involved in what your agency is doing?

Food for thought.
Posted by Skeptic
 - May 13, 2006, 06:28 PM
Quote from: Mr. Mystery on May 12, 2006, 01:49 AM

Try about 50%
Hardly decisive.

http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/11592

Worse.  Newsweek puts it at about 40% supporting the NSA "program" -- and that's before the full details have come out and been digested.

Realistically, though, the popularity isn't an issue, since we don't decide laws by popular vote (thank God).  Only the legality matters.  And on that score, the laws' pretty blatant.
Posted by Skeptic
 - May 13, 2006, 06:26 PM
Quote from: retcopper on May 12, 2006, 11:35 AMSgt., I have to apologize  because I posted my above message just to see what kid of response I would get in here. I also happen to agree wiht George on some matters but thinkk about it. What if  the NSA had information of another imminent 9/11 type attack and they could stop if  they vioalted the law by illegally listening to some phone converstions. Who in here would or wouldnt condone their actions?

I still don't agree that the NSA broke the law and if they didn't then the whistle blower should be prosecuted.

There are specific "ticking time bomb scenario" procedures by which the word could get out and the situation could be dealt with, not the least of which is the fact that under current FISA law, NSA and law enforcement can get warrants after the fact in emergencies.  It should be noted that true "ticking time bomb scenarios" are pretty unlikely.

And when it comes right down to it, if all else fails and they have to break the law to save Americans, the correct course of action isn't to cover it up.  The correct action, as detailed by Justice Charles Black, is to break the law if absolutely necessary, resign immediately thereafter and await trial and acquittal/pardon/conviction.  

By contrast, it is the coward's way out to use the fictional ticking time bomb scenario to justify an "anything goes" mentality.  Too many good Americans have given their lives over the last two and a half centuries to make this a country of laws and principles to throw those principles away the moment things get a little rough.
Posted by Skeptic
 - May 13, 2006, 06:12 PM
Quote from: George W. Maschke on May 11, 2006, 03:53 PM

Bullshit. The Bush administration knows damned well that what they're doing is illegal. That's why they circumvented the courts.

Ya gotta admit, "Retcopper", that the administration looks awfully guilty about this.  They avoid having anything on these programs tested in court like the plague, and they actively avoided informing just about everyone about this program, including most in Congress who normally should have been informed.  Those who were informed were sworn to secrecy and couldn't have done anything about it if they wanted to.

What's more, NSA just stopped a Justice Department inqury by refusing (laughably) Justice's investigators' security clearances.  If they don't think this is illegal, they're sure going out of their way to look like they do.

Finally, just about everyone without a vested political interest in defending the administration has said that these programs are unequivocally illegal.  And it looks like the participating telcom companies have been drawn into the illegality by violating explicit Communications Act statutes against sharing customer info with the Government barring warrants.  By all appearances, they're on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in damages to their customers, plus possible criminal charges.


QuoteYour attitude befits a nation of slaves. But not a democratic republic.

I rather think it befits a small and shrinking minority of craven pro-Bush'ers who are concerned with power and party over country.  But you say potato, I say potahto...
Posted by George W. Maschke
 - May 13, 2006, 06:01 AM
I share the concerns expressed in the following USA Today editorial:

QuoteNSA has your phone records; 'trust us' isn't good enough
Posted 5/11/2006 10:55 PM ET

The government is secretly collecting the phone records of millions of Americans.

Stop and think for a moment about the meaning of that simple, startling fact, exposed Thursday in a remarkable report by USA TODAY's Leslie Cauley.

In the narrowest interpretation, of course, it is benign. Possibly even helpful. It means that the National Security Agency (NSA) — the Pentagon-run spy agency that monitors communications — is using a new tool to hunt terrorists: Monitor phone traffic to identify threats and stop them.

This is all it means, President Bush told the public Thursday in a brief appearance aimed at quelling the instant outrage provoked by the story. He assured Americans that their civil liberties were being "fiercely protected" and that the government was "not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."

In other words, never mind appearances. Trust us.

Well, that is not all it means. Nor can the president's promise to protect privacy be reliably kept.

The fact that the government is trying to track (but not wiretap) every call you make and every call you receive — at home or on your cellphone is, to say the least, disturbing.

It means that your phone company (if you are a customer of AT&T, BellSouth or Verizon) tossed your privacy to the wind and collaborated with this extraordinary intrusion, and that it did so secretly and without following any court order.

That is, unless you're lucky enough to be served by Qwest, the one major phone company that had the integrity to resist government pressure.

It means that unless public opposition changes the government's course, this database will be compiled, updated and expanded into the indeterminate future, through countless administrations with who-knows-what interests and motives.

Only the most naive and unsuspicious soul could trust that it will remain safe, secured and for the eyes only of those hunting terrorists.

One need look no further than past abuses of power to be uncomfortable about the future. Richard Nixon during Watergate. Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. J. Edgar Hoover during his long reign as FBI director.

Even assuming that the Bush administration's motives are pure, and that this program merely looks for patterns of calls that could reveal terror networks, it raises a number of troubling questions:

Is it legal? Bush insists it is, but that's questionable. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a court order to gather a person's current phone records. A 1934 law requires phone companies to protect customers' privacy. And the Fourth Amendment forbids "unreasonable searches and seizures."

Is it useful? Taken as a whole, such a database is of dubious utility. U.S. intelligence-gathering agencies are already suffering from an abundance of raw information and a dearth of good intelligence. Looking for suspicious patterns among billions of phone numbers seems like the ultimate search for a needle in a haystack.

Is it foolproof? These types of databases invariably have errors. The federal terrorist "watch list," which is used to screen airline passengers, has ensnared a number of innocent travelers — among them Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and a 23-month-old toddler — whose names are similar to, or the same as, suspects on the list. Once you're mistakenly targeted, the error can be nearly impossible to fix and your life can be turned upside down.

Will it be abused? Maybe not at first. Over time, however, this vast quantity of data is a potentially irresistible tool for government officials who want to zero in on individual Americans.

At the very least, one can imagine this information being used by law enforcement agencies trying to trace people who have attracted their attention but about whom they don't have enough information to justify a court order. Or to look for whistle-blowers who have leaked sensitive information to reporters.

Consider what happened in the 1960s and '70s, the last time federal law enforcement and national security agencies launched mass snooping expeditions against U.S. citizens. The FBI, which became a clearinghouse for the data, sent them to the CIA, the Justice Department and the IRS, where some of the data were used in tax probes.

"Information that should not have been gathered in the first place has gone beyond the initial agency to numerous other agencies and officials, thus compounding the original intrusion," concluded a committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, which investigated and reported on the abuses in 1976. The amount of information was "so voluminous," it was difficult "to separate useful data from worthless detail."

NSA's technological capabilities, the Church Committee wrote, are a "sensitive national asset" valuable to the national defense. Even so, it warned, "if not properly controlled ... this same technological capability could be turned against the American people, at great cost to liberty."

The panel's conclusions about NSA are as valid today as they were then.

The phone record program serves as a powerful reminder of how, in a digital age, records can be compiled and analyzed in ways you are unaware of.

And combined with a separate NSA program (revealed in December by The New York Times) to eavesdrop without warrants on international calls from the USA, it raises the question of what other secret and constitutionally suspect programs the Bush administration might still be shielding.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA for six years and is now Bush's nominee to be CIA director, is a master of evasion. Speaking in January about the international eavesdropping, he said the program is not a widely cast "drift net" but is narrowly "focused" and "targeted."

Perhaps. But, at the time, he was fully aware of a program that is many of the things the other is not. A 2006 version of the Church Committee is needed to investigate the anti-terror programs created in the scary aftermath of 9/11, and the Senate should hold up Hayden's nomination until all its questions are answered.

Creating a huge, secret database of Americans' phone records does far more than threaten terrorists. It is a deeply troubling act that undermines U.S. freedoms and threatens us all.

The White House declined to provide an opposing view to this editorial.
Posted by EosJupiter
 - May 12, 2006, 12:54 PM
Quote from: retcopper on May 12, 2006, 11:35 AMSgt., I have to apologize  because I posted my above message just to see what kid of response I would get in here. I also happen to agree wiht George on some matters but thinkk about it. What if  the NSA had information of another imminent 9/11 type attack and they could stop if  they vioalted the law by illegally listening to some phone converstions. Who in here would or wouldnt condone their actions?

I still don't agree that the NSA broke the law and if they didn't then the whistle blower should be prosecuted.

Retcopper,

You are entitled to your opinion, but what parts of the 4th amendment haven't been trampled here. Not even executive power has the power to break these base laws of our land.  Now add that all the intelligence heads are military officers, loyal and reporting to the commander in chief,  not much else left before we really are a police state, or Dictatorship. I for one will not bugde one inch in my condemnation of this behavior. And if you know history, the Partriot act and the Enabling Act (Nazi Germany 1938)  :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act

BOth documents have the same rhetoric and intent. Where they allow the circumvention of the constitution. Try reading it, and tell me we are not heading in the same direction.  But as predicted and banked upon, people are willing to be subjugated. for safety.

Regards ....
Posted by retcopper
 - May 12, 2006, 11:35 AM
Sgt., I have to apologize  because I posted my above message just to see what kid of response I would get in here. I also happen to agree wiht George on some matters but thinkk about it. What if  the NSA had information of another imminent 9/11 type attack and they could stop if  they vioalted the law by illegally listening to some phone converstions. Who in here would or wouldnt condone their actions?

I still don't agree that the NSA broke the law and if they didn't then the whistle blower should be prosecuted.
Posted by George W. Maschke
 - May 12, 2006, 08:39 AM
CNN's Jack Cafferty had sharp words regarding the latest NSA revelations. Video available here:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/05/11.html#a8245
Posted by George W. Maschke
 - May 12, 2006, 04:22 AM
It's remarkable that President Bush has the effrontery to state "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans" when the USA Today article reports that the NSA is doing precisely that with Americans' calling records -- again, without our knowledge (until a courageous whistleblower talked to the press) or consent. The President must think we're pretty stupid.
Posted by Mr. Mystery
 - May 12, 2006, 01:49 AM
Quote from: retcopper on May 11, 2006, 03:09 PMI bet 90% of the American public think the same way.

Try about 50%
Hardly decisive.

http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/11592
Posted by Sergeant1107
 - May 11, 2006, 08:47 PM
Quote from: retcopper on May 11, 2006, 03:09 PMI dont know if what they are doing is illegal. The jury is still out on that.   If it prevents another 9/11 I dont care if it is legal or not. It's better to be safe than close the barn door after the horses have been left out. I bet 90% of the American public think the same way.
I see.

You don't know if their actions are illegal, and you don't know if what they are doing will help identify terrorists.

Do you even know why you are cheering?  Or have you just mindlessly decided to be in favor of anything George is against?