The Man's got your phonecalls

Great Debates
1

All of ‘em. Well, not all, but they’ve sure got a lot.
From CNN.com. So, Uncle Sam knows how often I call my girlfriend. I don’t personally feel too violated because I haven’t got a thing to hide, but I do feel a growing sense of paranoia in the larger context of the eavesdropping and the fact that most of our Congresspeople don’t seem to have a clue about what’s going on. How on earth does it benefit us to have everything known to the government?
Perhaps I’m naive, but it seems like a more efficient intelligence program (yer doin’ a heckuva job, Ponte!) wouldn’t need so much data.
Should the government be able to get all this information? Does it really need it?

Alas, ol’ uncle Ben said it best…Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.

2

psst. We’re not panicking over here.

I considered putting it in GD, but it’s already gotten ugly. I think the Pit is the place.

3

Unless you are connecting with some 'Person of Interest" I doubt there is any further interest and little to worry about.
As the little boy said: It’s not school that bothers me, It’s the Principle of the thing.

4

Isn’t that a bit like saying, “Hey, unless there was reasonable cause, you’ve got no reason to be troubled by the cops already having searched your car.”

5

I’m against it. Said so in the Pit, say so here.

6

If this program is so innocuous, let the white house publicly release the phone numbers of each and every call they make each day.
No harm could come of that if their motives are pure, right?

7

Have you called a doctor.An oncologist-have you made reservations at an arabic restaurant-have you talked to any body who has connections to any mideast organizations-how do you know-have you called a Democratic Organization-Is there info that can be misinterpreted and twisted.Are you sure.

8

I do not like it, not one damn bit, and neither should any other freedom-loving American. This is where I begin to drift leftward in my liberalism, coming dangerously close to libertarianism.

It’s nobody’s business whether I have anything to hide, least of all the U.S. government’s. If I’m a journalist with contacts inside an al Queda cell in the Minnesota, I’ve got one helluva story on my hands. Whether I alert my fellow Americans to a possible attack from that cell is my ethics problem to wrestle with, not the NSA’s. Yes, I understand, they’re trying to find the bad guys among us, but there aren’t easy answers here in the Land of the Free. I really hate to stoop to quoting smarmy movies, but this issue always brings to mind the climactic scene from “The American President” in which Andrew Shepherd says: "Everybody knows America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free, then the symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”

A few years ago everybody I know in Colorado was cussing Qwest for its crappy service and the way it royally rogered its employees and their pension fund. Today, the service is a lot better and Qwest is a beloved hereabouts because they, alone among the major telephone service providers, refuse to provide the requested information to the NSA.

I don’t doubt that it would make the NSA’s job easier to know exactly whom everybody in America called, when and how often. But nobody in America has any obligation to make the NSA’s job easier.

Look, folks, we’re in this mess exactly because we trusted our government too much. We trusted the FBI and the CIA and the rest of the Washington alphabet soup to protect us. They don’t deserve that trust. Not now, not ever. We should never trust the American citizens who are the U.S. government – and that means the very people we elect. Now, I like Sen. Ken Salazar, even voted for him. And Sen. Wayne Allard is one of the best guys I’ve ever met, TIME Magazine’s spurious attack on him notwithstanding. But I don’t trust either of 'em to do what’s best for me. I am deeply suspicious of their motives, their reasoning and their agendas.

Even as I write this, the Associated Press is breaking a story about the FBI searching the home of former CIA executive director Kyle Foggo. It isn’t important what Foggo is suspected of – the point is that even the FBI and the CIA don’t trust the man who had, at his fingertips, the nation’s greatest security secrets. Remember J. Edgar Hoover and the tawdry details of Martin Luther King Jr.'s private life? If I ever decide to blow my marriage out of the water by cheating on my wife, I sure as hell don’t want the revelation to come from a government agent!

So no, I don’t want anyone to know who I call or when or how often. It’s nobody’s damn business.

9

The linked story says the bill would forbid libraries from providing access to MySpace. Interesting to me – I just started work as a reference librarian in a public branch library. The most popular thing we offer is a set of Internet-linked computers, and quite recently and suddenly, patrons found our filtering software (which we use to prevent users from going to porn sites, etc.) was blocking them from accessing MySpace. Not a policy decision of the library system, AFAIK; I guess whoever runs the software made that decision (or else the software itself made the decision, automatically, when it detected some objectionable content on MySpace). However, we have been provided with a password we can use to override the block for a patron who wants to access MySpace. That only works on the adult side of the floor. On the computers in the children’s section, the blocks cannot be overriden.

10

Please disregard, the above post was mean for a different thread.

11

Does anyone else get the feeling that George W probably knows who called Hillary?

12

Yes.
I concurred with the previous outrage regarding listening in on phone calls without a warrant but not in this case.

As best as I can understand it, the data acquired by the government is only relevant to the program searching for links to a suspect. It quickly reveals further links that may uncover a cell of operatives on the verge of unleashing a terrorist attack. At this point, I would expect that a search warrant would be required to justify listening in on the resulting phone numbers.
The degree of privacy intrusion and government knowledge resulting from this data collection doesn’t even come close to what the government has long acquired through the census and our federal tax returns. The purpose of these privacy intrusions have been accepted for economic purposes. I would have no problem in turning my phone bills over to a government agency for the purpose of thwarting a terrorist attack.

13

:confused:

14

Problem is, it can’t be for fighting terrorism - it makes no sense. The Govt is apparently lying yet again…

So a communicaton map with n nodes is in a computer somewhere now, where n is approximately the population of the US, and there are n^x links between them.

This is useless in fighting terrorism, or any other crime, until it becomes known by the posessor of this map that at least one node is a “suspected terrorist”. I’d guess there are maybe a few thousand such nodes at best, depending on the rigor of your definition.

At that point of reasonable suspicion, a warrant can be issued and the call records of those particular node(s) revealed, thus leading to the same results without all the “noise to signal” issues of such a huge database, or issues of legality, or the political ramifications.

I am forced to conclude that there is more than just fighting terrorists on the government’s mind here.

That the program has been executed in secret, to the degree that ethics investigators from the DOJ were refused access to ensure things are on the up and up, and the congresscritters are generally in the dark about it is extremely disturbing.

The thought that there is even more going on here than has already been revealed is completely disgusting. Especially when this adminstration’s track record is considered.

It would be nice if the “If you have nothing to hide, then why oppose such measures” chestnut were also applicable to our leadership. :rolleyes:

15

Well, now that the terrorists know the procedure, I’m sure they’ll make the neccessary adjustments.

16

Assuming you’re serious, that’s just dumb. What is it that is so difficult to understand about correlating phone numbers?

Or, casting the best possible light on it, you’re being woefully naive. Your assumption is that “terrorists” (in quotes to emphasize that this program doesn’t discriminate) don’t have the intelligence to be careful about who they call from their phones, much less which phone they use. My assumption would be that an actual terrorist (who might actually be successful in their plans) has enough brains to at least use pay phones, if not an untraceable cell phone.

17

I assume that your keyboard comes with a space bar. You might want to consider using it.

18

Both the census and the tax returns have been authorised by a federal law, passed by the people’s elected reps, in Congress assembled, so that everyone could have their say on the policy.

That’s not the case here, it would appear. The feds have just been asking for the information, without any statutory authorisation or judicial warrant, and the telephone companies have rolled over

19

Anyone who doesn’t have any problems with this program, please e-mail me a copy of your last telephone bill (with its list of whose numbers you dialed) so I can check it for any possible terrorist affiliations.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

20

Source: http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/

So the government is also going after reporters in order to catch whistleblowers just so they can prevent all of us from knowing what the government are doing.