There’s a movement to thank Qwest for being the only telecom who didn’t roll over for the NSA invasion of privacy. It’s not that Qwest didn’t want to help, they simply told the administration what the other lapdogs should have: get a freaking warrant.
Please tell me more about how much you love Qwest.
U.S. Supreme Court: SMITH v. MARYLAND
No warrant needed.
Rather than explain the various laws that have succeeded Smith v Maryland to JWG, it might be useful to examine the facts at hand.
If the NSA’s actions were legal and above-board why did they refuse Qwest’s request to take the NSA proposal to the FISA court?
And, if the NSA’s proposal were legal, why did the NSA refuse Qwest’s request to get a letter of authorization from the DoJ?
Seems to me if this were as legal and kosher as JWG asserts–getting at least one of those authorizations would have been very simple.
No wonder Qwest doesn’t want to voluntarily cooperate with a legal government request…a clear example of a “good corp” for liberals to celebrate.
We re not mining Bush, today.
“This is a data-mining program” Phile, tonight.
I’m glad we agree the President is a liar. We’re just arguing over to what extent he broke the law. Bottom line: if KGB GWB wants my phone records, he better show me a warrant or go to Congress to have the law changed. He can’t just go around the law.
I’ll tell you who else now loves Qwest… Anyone want to guess?
Oliver, in your post you simultaneously whine about this program being an “invasion of privacy” and, done without a warrant. Am I to take it that you’re just fine with having your privacy invaded, as long as it’s done with a warrant? You and your ilk are utterly pathetic. You can’t even figure out what about these NSA programs angers you.
The DEMS keep trying to convince the rest of us that they’ll be tough on national security, while doing eveything they can to paralyse the sitting president from using reasonable methods to protect us. The same methinds that ANY responsible president would emply – Democrat or Republican. Anyone that thinks the NSA can spy on the millions of phone calls made every second in this country, needs get off the crack. This is a data-mining program, where computers search for patterns that may help thwart the next terrorist attack.
God help us all if a Democrat is elected president anytime soon.
-phil
No, really…please enlighten me.
My problem is with a massive dragnet with no warrant. If there’s enough evidence to warrant a warrant then heck yeah they should tap someone’s phone. But what they’ve done is the exact opposite. The use of the words “reasonable” and “responsible” in the same sentence as George W. Bush expired long ago, though I wouldn’t agree with giving these kingly powers to any President.
It has been amusing watching some of the flailing by the right going on here, but you’ll see that Qwest’s CEO is clearly the kind of commie pinko leftist who gives to the RNC and to Republican candidates (as well as some Democratic ones).
It still says Impeach Bush.
if KGB GWB wants my phone records, he better show me a warrant or go to Congress to have the law changed. >>
You may be too late for that. Wait til we find out exactly HOW MANY tens of millions of Americans have been data-mined by Our Leader’s minions.
Actually, there is no need to look any further than Smith vs Maryland to illustrate why JWG is wrong. That case allowed for use of a “pen register” to capture phone numbers called from or to a suspect’s phone. Phone records are not covered by the fourth amendment as numbers are automatically shared with the phone company when they are dialed, thus making them “public” (at least in the eyes of the court). However, this does not pass along the right to monitor the content of those calls. What’s more, the case argued for the use of such measures in specific criminal cases where reasonable cause could be established, and not for gigantic fishing expeditions ala the NSA’s data mining efforts. I gar-oon-tee there is no law anywhere that covers such a ridiculously broad abuse of warrantless surveillance as what we are witnessing with the Bush administration.
To paraphrase others, “so are you pinko lefties against illegal warrantless wiretapping except when it’s done with a warrant…and…err…legal or something?”
How do some heads manage such logic without exploding? Even if I thought that current laws concerning privacy were too broad with regards to government surveillance (and I do, thanks Patriot Act), I can still hold the Bush administration accountable for failing to rise to even THAT standard.
The current NSA phone number “scandal” has nothing to do with the content of the calls.
Because it’s right there in the law.
JWG, from your Cornell law link
(a) Duty to Provide. A wire or electronic communication service provider shall comply with a request for subscriber information and toll billing records information, or electronic communication transactional records in its custody or possession made by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under subsection (b) of this section.
I will ask again, in the context of this law: If it is legal to get the records of a telephone provider without a warrant, how was it legal for Qwest Communications to refuse this request?
I assert that that fact makes your link irrelevant to this case.
Then I wouldn’t fly in an airplane if I were you. You’ll get searched without a warrant … or probable cause.
I would switch my service to Qwest, but they only serve Pacific NW
Az, Colorado, Neb and Minnesota.
If it is legal to get the records of a telephone provider without a warrant, how was it legal for Qwest Communications to refuse this request?
This question makes no sense. Your position is the NSA program is illegal because Qwest was legally able to refuse the request.
That’s absurd. It’s perfectly legal for a cop to ask if he can search my car, but it’s perfectly legal for me to say no.
I guess my question to the right wing apologists is: why?
The program seems to be grossly inefficient and wasteful. They monitor millions of call patterns and must generate leads that need to be investigated. How many leads? Thousands I believe is the current wisdom, and how many of these leads pan out? We haven’t heard of any successes yet. That is thousands of people being investigated by government resources with no basis other than they called Grandma at the wrong time. Wouldn’t the money be bettrer spent on border security?
Someone tell me what anti-terrorist information they are trying to get from this program.
Why do it? At what point do you say the government needs to analyse my phone calling patterns to determine whether I think right? How easy would it be to flag political targets? It’s not like they are watching for you to call 1-800-bin-Laden.
Nice strawman JayC. This isn’t a cop asking to search your car. This is the cop asking the garage attendent if he can search every car in the garage, just because he wants to. The point was the NSA was unable or unwilling to demonstrate a legal justification for the request. The law pretty much seems clear that the phone companies have no right to share those records without legal justification. It also seems pretty clear the NSA has no right to have these records without legal justification even if they do say please.
Re: airport searches, I know the rules before I buy the ticket. And if I don’t want to be searched, I can walk away. Whereas with the telephone search, we’ve only found out that we were searched after the fact, without our consent or the consent of our elected representatives or our appointed judges. Not the same thing at all, trolly.
The question that hasn’t been answered yet is “what kind of patterns are they looking for?”
If a 19 year-old man calls a number twelve times in ten minutes, is that suspicious? Even if it’s just a problem of dropped signals from his cellphone?
If a man named Mohammed has frequent calls to a man named Ali, is that suspicious? Even if Mohammed is Ali’s brother?
What byzantine equation has the NSA come up with that equals “terrorist threat”?
Bd, there are more questions:
What happens to the database of numbers NOT linked to any terrorism or terrorist suspects? Are they discarded? When?
What government employees are allowed to access this database? What safeguards are in place to ensure that the data is used ONLY for terrorist linkages?
The answer, I suspect, is that the numbers are never discarded, and any NSA employee with access to the database can use the database for any number of nefarious purposes, from checking up on their spouse to blackmailing a politician. It is up to the government to prove differently.
Who says the database is limited to phone calls? There is nothing to suggest that the biggest database in the world is simply tracking phone call patterns. I would think that is just one thing it tracks. Internet, text messages, e-mail, and more is probably in there.
The potential for abuse of this system is HUGE.
Patterns will soon reveal that American Idol is a terrorist cell.
TomY Says:
We re not mining Bush, today.
This is a data-mining program Phile, tonight.
Nice cherry-pick TomY. Bush’s exact words were: “We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.” Which is correct. There’s a difference between listening in to phone calls in order to gather personal information, and a cluster of computers monitoring these calls in order to detect certains patterns.
Read the entire USA Today article, and you will see this:
“Phone customers names, addresses and other personal information are not being collected as part of this program.”
Anyone who thinks we should not be doing this needs to provide an alternative method for preventing terrorist activity within US borders.
-phil
you re invoking your right to believe whatever you like, regardless of the information at hand?
Yeah, kind of like the Secretary of Defense, the former head of the CIA, the office of the Vice President and the Commandant in Chief did before the Iraq war.
Note to the erroneously named factcheck: It’s not the phone book you need
You need this:
https://www.coleinformation.com/shop/SearchResults.aspx
or this:
http://tinyurl.com/pgq3k
But you were very, very close…
Phile’s right, there is no way, no invention, that could relate a phone number to a persons name and address.
Oh Yea, there’s this
What an idiot.
Things we can do to help prevent terrorism without spying on Americans:
1. Stop funding terrorist regimes such as Israel and Egypt.
2. Secure our container ports.
3. Deport people who have overstayed their visas, properly fund INS.
4. Don’t fire Arabic Translators who are whistleblowers.
5. Stop threatening to nuke Islamic countries.
6. Pull out of Iraq.
7. Start allocating homeland security money to homeland security, not garbage trucks in Newark and high paid government jobs for Bush cronies.
8. Force Condi and Georgie to read their Daily PDB’s Maybe we could quiz them on it or something.
9. Stop Republican administrations from funding terrorist organizations, such as the Contras or the Taliban.
In other words, factcheck, you’re invoking your right to believe whatever you like, regardless of the information at hand? Indeed, that would be consistent with the Democratic Party modus operandi.
Oh, and if you could be so nice as to point out where I made any claim that “there is no way, no invention, that could relate a phone number to a persons [sic] name and address”, I’d be very appreciative.
-phil
you d be more than happy to point out a war and post-war nation building that has gone better than Iraq has gone, to date.
First off, I was referring to how we got there in the first place and the intelligence that got us there, not “nation-building”, but since you bring it up, how about this one?
By the time the plan had come to completion, the economy of every participant state, with the exception of Germany, had grown well past pre-war levels. Over the next two decades, Western Europe as a whole would enjoy unprecedented growth and prosperity.
Jackass.
The term “Angry Left” exists for good reason.
Frame said
Jesus H. Christ is this the stupidest thing anyone has ever posted here or what?
Unfortunately, Frame, it won’t take long until someone tops it. My money is on Jay C or JT.
Would it be too much to expect a subtantial argument from the lefties in this crowd?
I’m sure, duro62, you’d be more than happy to point out a war and post-war nation building that has gone better than Iraq has gone, to date. I’ll be waiting patiently for my history lesson.
-phil
“Anyone who thinks we should not be doing this needs to provide an alternative method for preventing terrorist activity within US borders.”
Jesus H. Christ is this the stupidest thing anyone has ever posted here or what? Let me think, what alternatives might there be to keeping a permanent record of millions of people’s every phone call in violation of statutes? Oh ya, how about, GET A FUCKING WARRANT LIKE THE LAW ALLOWS?!?!?!?!?!
Idiot.
“The term Angry Left exists for good reason.”
Same for “The Idiot Right” …
From the Library of Congress, not the World Book Encyclopedia of the Internet WikiPedia
Key Dates for the Marshall Plan
* March 12, 1947
The “Truman Doctrine,” outlined in a presidential speech to Congress, makes it U.S. policy to protect nations threatened by communism.
* June 5, 1947
In a speech at the Harvard commencement, Secretary of State George C. Marshall calls for an American plan to help Europe recover from World War II.
* June 19, 1947
The British and French Foreign ministers issue a joint communiqué inviting twenty-two European nations to send representatives to Paris to draw up a cooperative recovery plan.
* July 12, 1947
The Conference of European Economic Cooperation, which became the Committee of European Economic Cooperation (CEEC), meets in Paris.
The Soviet Union declines to attend and pressures Czechoslovakia, Poland,
and Hungary into staying away.
* September 1947
The CEEC submits its report estimating needs and the cost of the
European Recovery Program (ERP) over four years. It provides for the
establishment of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation
(OEEC) to coordinate the program from the European side.
* February 1948
A Soviet-backed, communist coup occurs in Czechoslovakia.
* April 2, 1948
Congress passes the Economic Cooperation Act that authorizes the
Marshall Plan. President Truman signs it the next day.
* April 1948
Paul Hoffman of Studebaker Corporation is appointed Administrator of the Economic Cooperation Agency (ECA), the temporary American agency created to implement the plan. Averell Harriman is appointed special representative of the ECA in Europe.
* April 15, 1948
First official meeting of the OEEC in Paris to determine national needs prior to passage of appropriations bill by U.S. Congress.
* June 30, 1949
The Federal Republic of Germany officially enters the OEEC in the second year of the program.
* December 31, 1951
The ERP ends six months early because of the escalation of the Korean War, which had begun in June 1950. Transfer of funds from the U. S. to Europe had totaled $13.3 billion. {The War was over for over 6 years already – FD}
* July 5, 1972
In a speech at the Harvard commencement, West German chancellor Willy Brandt announces creation of the German Marshall Fund to thank the U.S. for its assistance.
I guess there’s a few years to wait…
Phile squawked:
“Oh, and if you could be so nice as to point out where I made any claim that there is no way, no invention, that could relate a phone number to a persons [sic] name and address , I d be very appreciative.”
No problem, you did it when you pointed out that:
Phone customers names, addresses and other personal information are not being collected as part of this program.
Which as I pointed out, is irrelevant because of those uncanny inventions called “phone books”.
Yes or no. Are you in favor of recording all phone calls in the US, because some may be related to terrorism? I mean, since there is NOTHING that can be done to protect the homeland from nucular destruction, right?
How about installing two way video screens in everyone’s house, and in every public area? I mean, don’t you want to stop terrorism? Just looking for consistency here.
it won t take long until someone tops it.
Well, we haven’t heard from Dr. Pedro in a while…
Thank you, Frank, for that exhaustive research. ( Iknew you’d give me sh*t about wikipedia).
and I never said it was a quick process.
The typing was tougher than the research, and the “Marshall Plan” ‘hit’ (50th Anniversary) was right below the two MickiPedia hits.
I’m telling you, duros, MickiPedia is made up of websites…
It’s easy enough to cut out the “middle man.”
“Things we can do to help prevent terrorism without spying on Americans:…”
How about just good old fashioned police/spy work? The FBI infiltrated the mafia, we couldn’t do the same for some jihadist network? We can’t recruit informers from in the jihadist world? Of course not because the War on Terror is a WAR not a law enforcement problem. Only pussies think it’s a law enforcement problem.
Naturally good old fashioned police work won’t be enough in this WAR especially since this is a “war like no other war ever fought in the history of mankind.” Yes, my children, the war on terror is the proverbial “new thing under the sun” that we’ve been expecting for millenia. Yup, never been anything like it before in the history of all things. Indeed, no one has ever cracked a terrorist network/cell before using things like warrants, human intelligence, leg work and brains. It’s just never happened before ever.
From an interview on ABC:
[According to Russell Tice, a former NSA agent,] the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.
“If you picked the word ‘jihad’ out of a conversation,” Tice said, “the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing.”
So the NSA has the tools (think Eschelon) to monitor EVERY domestic and international call. Notice, too, that they have the power to search for key phrases and terms. That’s quite a bit more detail than just a phone number. So are we supposed to believe that the current scandal only involves call lists? Or are those lists merely part of a larger eavesdropping operation?
intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect’s phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.
So a terrorist suspect (and we know that that includes such die hard fanatics as the Quakers) calls someone, who has called many other “someones,” who in turn have all called many other “someones” and they all potentially make the monitor list. Now that’s efficient.
And JWG, thanks for proving my point with your link:
[The request must come from] the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or his designee in a position not lower than Deputy Assistant Director at Bureau headquarters or a Special Agent in Charge in a Bureau field office designated by the Director…
…request the name, address, length of service, and local and long distance toll billing records of a person or entity if the Director (or his designee) certifies in writing to the wire or electronic communication service provider to which the request is made that the name, address, length of service, and toll billing records sought are relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such an investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely on the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States;
So the request has to come from the F.B.I. and not the N.S.A. Notice, too, the use of such terrorist enabling terms as “authorized” and “relevant” and “Constitution.”
Factcheck, I could leave 800 billion comments and wouldn’t come close to matching the total number of completely asinine and idiotic comments you have left here.
Really. You and Jadegold make for a smorgasborg of stupidity.
Why are so many of you guys so willing to give up your fourth amendment rights to privacy?
Stop being so afraid!
If the NSA is such a great agency, why can’t another government agency investigate them?
Sounds like the KGB to me.
How’s the diet going JayC?
Why are so many of you guys so willing to give up your fourth amendment rights to privacy?
Because, IMHO, I gave up my right to privacy years ago — involuntarily.
So, since it’s gone, already, why squawk about it now, when that telephone information can be used against terrorists?
Can it be abused? Yes.
Will it be abused? That’s up to your handy dandy Congresshuman. If you stay on their ass, they stay off of yours.