... and keepin' old Cheney down (with apologies to Phil Ochs). But I couldn't resist, now that Chris Dodd (D-CT) has succeeded in stopping the FISA bill with its retroactive immunity for telco wiretapping.
It'll be back in January, but that's a whole new year, and a few more senators may be thinking about how it will look on their record.
NSA's Warrantless Wiretaps: How NSA Does It by Jerry Nelson
The Executive Branch has refused to tell very many Congressman very much about how the NSA system works. The secrecy seemed pointless to me, since any good technologist could figure it out. So I did. Not even your elected representatives could find out what I am about to tell you.
[...]
I leave you with one thought: neither God nor Nature owe the United States of America a democracy. If citizens give away all their freedoms, eventually they will have none. When the powerful have all the options and you have none, you are toast.
Democracies are not conquered. Democracies do not end when outsiders force them into subjugation. Democracies end when their citizens vote for a strongman who promises to protect them.
Here is how the National Security Agency is protecting you.
Remember what I've been saying about warrantless wiretaps? Nelson is saying it, too. Nothing new here, but it's thorough and well-written. As he says, "any good technologist could figure it out", but apparently not any politician. No surprise.
(Via ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif){kind=small}
cryptome)
Telcos wish to deny mass snooping | The Register
Furthermore, both companies have said they "cannot confirm or deny" that they've got a relationship with the NSA. Now, trust a journo on this one: in the commercial world, and in the political world, whenever a flack can deny something that might be bad for trade, share values, or winning the election, they always deny it. "I cannot confirm or deny" always means, "I cannot deny". There are no exceptions to this rule outside the realm of legal constraints against commenting in any way (gag orders, etc).
The Reg. does a pretty good job of parsing the careful, contorted language that Verizon and BellSouth use in "denying" that they've given anything to the NSA. And I understand the Brooklyn Bridge is up for sale on eBay...
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
Although the outrage is only now hitting the headlines, they've actually
been pretty open about it for months, as this article and
its references make clear. (From ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
finagler.)
The Washington Post had
an article in early February that says straight out that "NSA rules
since the late 1970s, when machine filtering was far less capable, have
said 'acquisition' of content does not take place until a conversation is
intercepted and processed 'into an intelligible form intended for human
inspection.'"
So the government has been spying on us for years, and the plain facts in the press have largely gone unnoticed until suddenly King George has an appointee to shift the blame onto. At this point there are only two likely possibilities:
I knew my phone was being tapped thirty-odd years ago. Welcome to the goldfish bowl.
Or at least a strong indication of the Party Line, from this article
Former NSA Director Bob Inman said the use of telephone and other databases might not have violated privacy rights. That's because the initial explorations were automated and personal information wouldn't have spread any further in most cases \u2014 a position supported by a former Bush administration official familiar with the monitoring program.
"Computers may have sorted through hundreds of millions of messages without a person ever seeing it. So no one's e-mail or phone call has been compromised," Inman said. "The problem only starts when the information goes to an analyst to read."
So there you have it, just as I said here. Computer wiretapping isn't really wiretapping, torture that doesn't leave a mark isn't really torture, laws the president disagrees with aren't really laws, speech on the internet isn't really speech, and don't even get me started on freedom of religion.
Shocked, I tell you! To think that the government is tapping our phones!
Am I the only one who isn't surprised? Here we have CNN and Reuters saying that "President George W. Bush denied on Thursday the government was "trolling through" Americans' personal lives, despite a report that [the NSA] was collecting phone records of tens of millions of citizens", and that "Bush did not confirm or deny the USA Today report. But he did say that U.S. intelligence targets terrorists and that the government does not listen to domestic telephone calls without court approval and that Congress has been briefed on intelligence programs."
Am I the only one who thinks that Bush is lying?
Here's what I think is behind the "warrantless wiretapping" program, and why it really has to be warrantless: they're listening to everything. The to/from numbers don't really need to go into a database -- that's how the phone companies keep track of billing. All they have to do is give the government access. That's the part they don't mind leaking. It's annoying, but it's obvious.
The part they don't want to get out, is that, probably, almost every single call is being listened to -- not by humans, of course (so they'll argue in court, if it comes down to it, that it's technically not listening at all) but by computers running speech recognition software. The software isn't very good -- it can't provide even approximate transcripts -- but it doesn't have to be. All it has to do is recognize a handful of keywords (like "bomb") and a couple of languages (like Arabic). That's enough to flag a call for more scrutiny, so they keep the recording and run it past a human. If it seems "suspicious", they look through the call database for a chain of calls linking it to a foreign number or somebody they're watching. Six degrees of separation says they'll probably find such a chain, so off they go to a (secret) court with the evidence they need to tap the phone.
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