Welllll … not being the author of the story, how the fuck would I know?
However, it’s not an opinion piece; one might assume it’s a reporting of facts or at least statements that have been presented to the reporter as facts. I was just offering it as a cite. I can’t even begin to adress your nit-picks. On the surface it all looks pretty squirrelly to me.
My initial reaction is not the minutia but that through the enhanced powers of this “terrorist surveillance program” we now know that Jim-Bob “Silo” McCoy likes his sphincter tickled when Lurlene is going down on him.
There has been a breach here, and it seems a direct result of the current administrations not really giving a shit if privacy rights are trampled on.
The logic is simple. On the off chance that you might possibly detect someone saying something wrong, you wiretap everybody all the time. Privacy rights do not exist any more. You belong to big brother.
Doctors Without Borders? Are you* shitting *me! OK, now I’m fucking steamed! These are guys who could just stay where they are and practice their hard-won professions in safety and ease, but instead subject themselves to hardship and danger to bring comfort to the afflicted and the (otherwise) hopeless.
In my book of fantasies, the entry after “Win the lottery” is “give a metric buttload of money to Doctors Without Borders”.
Goddammit! Trying to make it real compared to what!
Don’t you mean Medecins Sans Frontiers? They’re nothing but a bunch of America-hating Frenchies who hate America! Of course we need to tap their communication so they don’t their America-hating, socialized medicinal frog terrorism to the Homeland! I don’t want any French Internationalist Doctors, I want Freedom Doctors!
Fair enough; it was a general question that struck me as I read the article – I didn’t really expect you to answer it.
I disagree that it’s nitpicky. The answers to those questions makes a huge difference (to me, at least) as to whether or not the NSA is abusing its wiretap powers. To be sure, that one operator who passed lurid recordings around the office is in violation of policy.
But we’re not supposed to, even with the enhanced powers of this program. I suppose I’m more concerned with what they’re doing with my conversations once they collect them, rather than the fact that they’re being collected at all. Since I doubt the terrorists and their collaborators have published a phone book that’s easily accessible by US Intel, then they have to cast their net wide if they expect to collect any actionable intelligence at all. Unfortunately, they can’t know the content of a phone call until they’ve actually collected it and listened to it. Should they just scrap indiscriminate wiretapping altogether, despite the successes they’ve had with it? (Serious question, not being snarky) What would some alternatives be?
I agree there’s been a breach, but until they investigate further and publish more information, I can’t really say if it’s a failure of the administration or if this is an isolated anomaly enabled by shoddy oversight and management.
This is not to defend the practice, but to be snarky: I find the idea of expecting privacy on a satellite phone to be pretty laughable, myself (or even a cellphone for that matter).
And, allegedly, others in his office. We have only his word on that, but I would think if it had just been him he wouldn’t be talking about it. It takes at least two people to “pass something around the office” anyway.
(Hey, look – I can post again! I knew being a cheapskate would pay off eventually.)
I could have told you this would happen. When I worked in a Kinko’s, whenever a young woman would bring in her lingerie shots for copies (either for her boyfriend or her modeling portfolio), the whole store would come around to check them out.
This is the problem with wide, unregulated government monitoring of private communications – the monitors being people, they’re going to act in just this way. It’s only a matter of time before someone tapes one of these things and puts it up on YouTube.