I don’t know how many times or if this has been posted but here we go anyway. I am interested on everyone’s opinions on the following points:
•How much power does the FBI and CIA acutally have in private lives? After seeing “Enemy of the State”, I want to know if our government really can track anyone on the face of the earth, pick up any conversation over phones, the internet, etc…
•If you’ve ever listened to a Rage Against the Machine song you will understand my next question immediately. Does the government repress free speech and arrest innocent people like Mumia Abu-Jamal based on race? Has democracy failed? Is socialism the only alternative?
Now to work on my own questions a little:
Question one: I recently read an article in the Chicago Tribune about protests against a “listening post” or a station that intercepts all telephone communications, then searches for keywords like “bomb” or “anarchy” and records them for later review. Is this for real?
Now for the second question. I seem to have learned in school that democracy works better than communism. (Ex: Russia.) On the other hand, Russia isnt so great under democracy either. So whats the deal? Has the corrupt education system of the United States corrupted me?
Leave opinions and therories here. I’ll check back occasionally.
Amoung many other links.
Yes it exists. Yes they monitor E mails. All phone calls to outside the US are monitered. Don’t have to worry about the CIA very much. Nor the FBI. Watch out for the NSA. Wow, do I sound like a conspiracy freak or what?
I’m only going to address the last point, leaving the others to those more qualified:
Democracy in Russia has only been in place for about a decade. That is not nearly enough time to convert all of the massive centralized communist bureaucracies and other state machinery to something that is going to be more receptive to individual rights and liberties. Besides, if you’ll remember, democracy didn’t exactly work too well in the United States, at first. Remember the Articles of Confederation?
Part of my cynicism here is a lack of use of this information. If they are gathering this info, where has it been used and how come so much slips by them anyway. I would be especially be offeneded if they were really monitering communications and had failed to catch so much still.
My first piece of advice for you: Don’t base major decisions or worries on fictional movies.
Um, isn’t that the guy who murdered a cop? Presuming my memory is correct, here’s my second piece of advice: Free speech does not include murdering police officers.
Who says Russia really has democracy now? There are too many folks who had power under communism and who are still in power now. Sure, they have more “democracy” than they had before, but it will take them a while to become an actual democracy – if they ever make it.
Yeah, Abu-Jamal is the guy that murdered the cop all right. I can’t understand why people consider him “innocent.” Were there procedural problems with the trial? Probably. But that doesn’t absolve Abu-Jamal from what he did.
It’s somewhat similar to the O.J. situation. Sure, Fuhrman was a racist and the L.A. police stepped over the line in their investigation. But that doesn’t mean O.J. didn’t do it.
Maybe some would say Abu-Jamal should be a free man because of the way the prosecution handled the case. Some people (and why does it seem like most are alternative music groups and Hollywood Celebrities?) are committed to freeing this murderer because he is black, well-spoken, and able to hoodwink a lot of people just searching for a cause to latch on to.
When it comes down to it, though, a cop-killer is in prison. Justice is being served in this case.
Maybe I should not have jumped in on this, since my reply doesn’t really address the overall premise of the OP, and since I’ll be out of town for a week and unable to continue any discussion on Abu-Jamal. But I did.
I particularly liked (because my friend and I get a perverse thrill out of pointing out absurdities in movies) the part where he made a phone call from a pay phone at a convenience store, the feds traced the call to that store at some later time, and then backed up the satellite surveilance to that point in time, watched him make the phone call, and watched the car drive to its ultimate destination. (That’s how the feds found the hideout.)
The implication being that not only do the feds survey every location in the US (remember, they weren’t specifically watching that particular convenience store), they save at least the last ten minutes or so of that surveillance in cast they’ll need it later. Meaning not only that the sky is full of wall-to-wall spy satellites that we don’t know about (complete with satellite launchings that we aren’t aware that we’ve paid for), but that those satellites have more storage capacity and transmission bandwidth that we’d ever believed.
My brother-in-law and his wife (who have worked on commercial satellite systems) tell me that the military satellite cameras we have up there are as good in terms of resolution as that movie implied, though.
Oh good God! I cannot believe what I am reading in this thread! This is the kind of paranoid anti-government stuff that just kills me.
Do y’all really believe the Government has anything even remotely approaching the manpower to monitor the communications of average citizens??? There are 300 MILLION of us fercrissake!!! The Government could not, in the wildest wet dream of the most ambitious CIA spook, keep track of us all!!!
All these paranoid theories attribute WAY to much competence and capacity to our government. (Ever heard the expression “Close enough for government work?” That conveys some sense of the reality…)
No doubt, when the government targets a particular individual or group for surveillance (say, a terrorist group, for example), they have some impressive capabilities. Probably some capabilities we don’t even know about. But is the government monitoring all telephone calls? Or even all international calls? Aside from being wildly Unconstitutional, the notion is absurd from a practical perspective!
And is our “evil” government targeting particular citizens because of their race? Oh, Guinevere!!!
The scary thing is that people are so ready, even anxious, to buy into conspiracy theories, that someone like Johnny Cochran can concoct one out of whole cloth and successfully sell it to a jury.
Well I’m not a conspiracy freak, but yes, I think the government could keep a pretty good eye on us. In East Germany during the cold war there police force named the stazi had the scent of aboud 10,000 people in warehouses in case they needed to track then down with dogs. They did this without computers also. Does it hurt anyone if someone tries to keep our government honest?