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Originally posted by PaulBC:
And Democratics who decried this pratice under GW Bush's watch are now defending it as nessacary for national security.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Only people who spoke publicly against the Patriot Act when it was enacted have moral standing to bitch now.

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In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous? ow.ly/lKS13
@algore

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Only people who spoke publicly against the Patriot Act when it was enacted have moral standing to bitch now.

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Originally posted by tclune:

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Only people who spoke publicly against the Patriot Act when it was enacted have moral standing to bitch now.

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This is an incredibly self-defeating notion (unless you are trying to keep this abomination in place, of course.) We should welcome anyone who sees the light, however late, with open arms. Or so ISTM.

--Tom Clune

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Only people who spoke publicly against the Patriot Act when it was enacted have moral standing to bitch now.

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How much more hypocritical is it that those who once spoke publicly against it are now embracing it and utilizing it to it's fullest potential?

It was a horrible notion from the beginning, to be sure. Once again, under threat of X, Americans give away their freedoms to the government, who always knows best. Before it was the commies, now the terrorist, next it'll be something else.



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"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." - Mark Twain

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Originally posted by irish_lord99:
How much more hypocritical is it that those who once spoke publicly against it are now embracing it and utilizing it to it's fullest potential?

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Originally posted by irish_lord99:
Once again, under threat of X, Americans give away their freedoms to the government, who always knows best. Before it was the commies, now the terrorist, next it'll be something else.

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Originally posted by Golden Key:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is keeping an eye on the story.

Also the Common Dreams progressive news site, which has great resource links at the bottom of the page.

And Democracy Now is on the case.

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Originally posted by IconiumBound:
We have been told that the data collected is only the telephone numbers and the time of the call.

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Originally posted by LeRoc:
I'm definitely not a technician, but I understand that cell phones make contact with the nearest antenna, and the information of which antenna this is is stored.

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From Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez:
"It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation's foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action. "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances ... In no other way can we transmit to posterity unimpaired the blessings of liberty, consecrated by the sacrifices of the Revolution."
Source

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Originally posted by Grammatica:
PS: Is it only me who worries about political uses of this information?

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Well, yes, that is the concern. After all, the phone companies have had access to this data all along and nobody worried about it. Probably because the only likely use that the phone company would make of it is to sell the info to marketers to allow for even more targetted marketing. But the politically motivated could and would use it in so many disreputable and hypocritical ways.

Having said that, I do find it ironic that some people I know who freely talk on their cell phones on the bus, in restaurants and other public places are now muttering about their privacy being violated...

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"We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it."--Pope Francis, Laudato Si'

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Originally posted by Grammatica:

PS: Is it only me who worries about political uses of this information? If a cell phone can track location, it can track a "family values" politician on his regular visits to his mistress, boyfriend, or dominatrix and her dungeon. And that information can be used to keep the politician in line for crucial votes. Ditto for journalists. Similar uses of sensitive data were made, back in the pre-electronic age, anyway. [/QB]

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Grammatica: PS: Is it only me who worries about political uses of this information? If a cell phone can track location, it can track a "family values" politician on his regular visits to his mistress, boyfriend, or dominatrix and her dungeon. And that information can be used to keep the politician in line for crucial votes. Ditto for journalists. Similar uses of sensitive data were made, back in the pre-electronic age, anyway.

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Originally posted by no prophet:
We're told by the privacy law people in Canada that we should avoid USA-based data services entirely because we have no idea what they might be snooping on. This includes all business data back-up, internet calling services, health records.

It seems the idea of getting data is initially noble: detecting terrorists and other related threats and stopping them. But it gets misused. Considering the parallel to arresting people, with the misuse of black sites to hold them in.

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Fr Weber: But perhaps if we catch a few pedophiles it will all be worth it.

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Only people who spoke publicly against the Patriot Act when it was enacted have moral standing to bitch now.

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Originally posted by LeRoc:

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Fr Weber: But perhaps if we catch a few pedophiles it will all be worth it.

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No, prevention of pedophily doesn't justify everything.

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Originally posted by RuthW:
Oh for fuck's sake. Hedgehog, can you really not see the difference between an individual's stupid choice to talk too loudly in public and the government gathering metadata on phone calls made throughout the US and tapping straight into the servers of major internet service providers?

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Originally posted by Kelly Alves:

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Only people who spoke publicly against the Patriot Act when it was enacted have moral standing to bitch now.

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Isn't that one of the many conversations that gave Ruth W her title?

Yeah I remember the early days of the Patriot Act. For the most part, people who tried to speak out about it were labeled unpatriotic.

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Originally posted by Hedgehog:

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Originally posted by RuthW:
Oh for fuck's sake. Hedgehog, can you really not see the difference between an individual's stupid choice to talk too loudly in public and the government gathering metadata on phone calls made throughout the US and tapping straight into the servers of major internet service providers?

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Yes, Ruth, of course I do. That would explain my first paragraph. And why I used the word "ironic" in the second paragraph, while I used "disreputable and hypocritical" in the first.

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Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
So if I believe CSI, it is routine for the police to get a court order to get access to the cellphone records of a suspect, from which they derive his location as a function of time, and who his friends and contacts are.

The differences between that and this are:

1. Warehousing of data by NSA rather than relying on what the cellphone companies keep (maybe NSA keeps data longer).

2. Instead of requiring a court order to examine someone's phone records, the NSA needs to think that they might like to see them.

Do I have that right?

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Originally posted by Crœsos:
Not quite. The other difference is that instead of getting the records of a particular suspect the NSA is collecting everyone's phone records, whether they're suspected of anything or not. [/QB]

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Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
My understanding was that they collect everyone's records in the sense that they archive all the data so they have it available (that's my point 1), but only decide to look at particular individuals and their connections (but without the inconvenience of a little thing like a warrant).

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
My understanding was that they collect everyone's records in the sense that they archive all the data so they have it available (that's my point 1), but only decide to look at particular individuals and their connections (but without the inconvenience of a little thing like a warrant).

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I'm not sure that's a meaningful distinction under the law. Typically it's more concerned with what kinds of information the state collects and how it's collected than what's done with it after it's been acquired.

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◾By order of the FISC, the Government is prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program. All information that is acquired under this program is subject to strict, court-imposed restrictions on review and handling. The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization. Only specially cleared counterterrorism personnel specifically trained in the Court-approved procedures may even access the records.

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Originally posted by RuthW:

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Originally posted by Hedgehog:

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Originally posted by RuthW:
Oh for fuck's sake. Hedgehog, can you really not see the difference between an individual's stupid choice to talk too loudly in public and the government gathering metadata on phone calls made throughout the US and tapping straight into the servers of major internet service providers?

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Yes, Ruth, of course I do. That would explain my first paragraph. And why I used the word "ironic" in the second paragraph, while I used "disreputable and hypocritical" in the first.

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I still don't see how yapping too loud on the phone even comes into the conversation.

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Originally posted by Gildas:
Relatedly, I am never sure why people seem to object in principle to the government accessing other peoples e-mail accounts.

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Because that's the job of your employer?

--Tom Clune

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Originally posted by Gildas:
I think that David Simon makes rather a good point, here.

Relatedly, I am never sure why people seem to object in principle to the government accessing other peoples e-mail accounts. Personally, if Special Branch want to peruse, say, Anjem Choudary's hotmail account I think we should let them get on with it.

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Originally posted by Gildas:
The analogy is with the Baltimore PD making note of every telephone number being rung by a bank of payphones so they can establish that the payphones are being used to page drug dealers.

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Allow for a comparable example, dating to the early 1980s in a place called Baltimore, Maryland.

There, city detectives once began to suspect that major traffickers were using a combination of public pay phones and digital pagers to communicate their business. And they took their suspicions to a judge and obtained court orders — not to monitor any particular suspect, but to instead cull the dialed numbers from the thousands and thousands of calls made to and from certain city pay phones.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by Gildas:
The analogy is with the Baltimore PD making note of every telephone number being rung by a bank of payphones so they can establish that the payphones are being used to page drug dealers.

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Which makes it non-analogous to the NSA program.

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Allow for a comparable example, dating to the early 1980s in a place called Baltimore, Maryland.

There, city detectives once began to suspect that major traffickers were using a combination of public pay phones and digital pagers to communicate their business. And they took their suspicions to a judge and obtained court orders — not to monitor any particular suspect, but to instead cull the dialed numbers from the thousands and thousands of calls made to and from certain city pay phones.

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Note the difference. Unlike the current NSA program the police suspected certain, specific pay phones of being used for criminal activity and presented enough evidence supporting this "probable cause" to an independent judge, probably "supported by Oath or affirmation", upon which a warrant was issued. The Baltimore police didn't say "we suspect drug traffickers are using phones, so we want to review the records of all phone calls made in Baltimore".

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Originally posted by Gildas:
Now admittedly my understanding of the social dynamic here derives from the wire but the Baltimore PD getting the info from payphones in the projects largely affects the urban underclass whereas mobile phone ownership affects People Like Us. This couldn't have anything to do with the "woe unto Illium" routine, could it?

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