Government Turns on Citizens
This:
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.
For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.
…
As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.
Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
is not about terrorism. It is about the creation of a surveillance state. They are keeping calls from you to your mom, to your doctor, to your rabbi, to your psychiatrist, to your local chapter of the NRA. They are tracking who you talk to and when you talk to them. They are intruding themselves into your life in the same manner that dictators do. Every time you make a phone call, a record is being kept for essentially ever, and that record can then be used later to track your activities and gain tons of privet information by cross referencing it with other databases of information. Use a phone, and the government is going to take away your privacy, in violation of the FISA law.
Bush has turned the government on its own people. It is now standing over your shoulder, noting when you call and who you call and storing that information for use later, as it sees fit, when it sees fit, with no apparent oversight or regard for the law or the Constitution or even basic truth:
“The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities,” he said. “Our efforts are focused on Al Qaeda and their known associates.”
Tens of millions of Americans have had their privacy violated, their lives dissected through their phone records by the government. How many people really believe that tens of millions of Americans are associates of Al Qaeda? This is the slippery slope we are hurtling down. This is a warning of Big Brother, it is Big Brother. These are the tactics of a police state and they are not theoretical consequences of policy or decisions; Bush and the GOP are using them and defending them today.
The question is simple: do you want to live in something like a more efficient Soviet Union, or do you want to live in America?
This is short of wire tapping, listening in on other people’s conversations. They’re trying to find terrorists by seeing who known terrorists are calling. Since it only involves who called who and they say it’s out of the country calls only then it’s somewhat vague that anyone’s privacy is actually violated. This at least gives them a reason to leave the judge out, not get a warrant to do what they are doing.
Maybe the judge won’t give them permission. That’s why they’re not getting warrants. They could argue to the judge there was probable cause, some crook somewhere called someone. That’s a given in as much as Bush makes phone calls doesn’t he to say nothing of Dick, Karl and Scoot.
Thank you NSA for doing your job.
[...] Lean Left maintains that this “is not about terrorism. It is about the creation of a surveillance state” and asks whether “want to live in something like a more efficient Soviet Union . . . ” [...]
I just wonder whether or not the banking institutions are giving copies of our records to be crosstabulated with the phone numbers? If they have the phone numbers, they can easily look up the names and addresses. If they have your financial records, they have everything about you that they’d ever want to know.
BIll
Didyoureadthe article? This involves domestic calls thatnumberinthe tensofmillions.
Kevin,
Dawn is right. There are a lot of phone calls going on daily. Let’s look at this reasonably for a minute. I will use my numbers but you can use your own and the end result will be the same.
Say there are 300 million Americans. Say 200 million of them use the phone 30 minutes a day. This adds up to 700 million hours a week of conversations per week that Bush is having people listen to (actually this started long before Bush but I am humoring you for the moment). To pay people to listen to these conversations 40 hours per week you would need 17.5 million people on the payroll for this job alone.
To think that out of 700 million conversation hours George Bush is listening to your conversations is, at the least, very self flattering. The NSA is tracking down terrorists and could care less about your conversations!
This is yet another way the liberals are attempting to sabotage efforts to keep terrorism at bay. Please continue to fight those fighting terrorism. It makes rational thinking so much more attractive.
RMatey
This is brilliant detective work! The government conspires to cross reference phone numbers with names, addresses, and financial information from banks! That is the epitome of evil. I’m almost ashamed to be an American.
I know my intellect can’t match that of a liberal but if I were a spy for the NSA and wanted this information I would pull up tax records easily at my disposal. I would look right up at the top where it says Name – Address – Phone Number – How Much Did You Make?’
Granted; this would only work for those of us that actually pay taxes!
This could prove to be an interesting issue come election time. Current polling shows opposition to the connection database only running in the thirties. If Dems come out strong against this, they might again get labeled as soft on terrorism.
Truth, interesting manpower analysis concerning listening to the phone calls. Not sure why it is relevant however, since calls are not being monitored under this program, but that’s a minor point I guess.
Ted
No, its just truth being truth. He knows that the problem isn’t listneing, its the associated data mining tied to those records. he just prefers to attack strawmen.
But since he built that little bit of straw, I should remind him that the tapes that would have prevented 9/11 were translated on 9/12. At best, all a program like this does is add more useless busy work for the people responsible for tracking actual terrorists.
Ted
You aren’t labeled soft on terrorism, you ARE soft on terrorism. This is something that I and countless others point out daily in our everyday lives.
I should remind Kevin that, the truth is, he really absolutely has no idea what sort of events have been prevented by NSA activities. For him to assert otherwise is laughable.
Okay, Fred and Ted, how far are you willing to let them go? Is any infrignment on our freedoms okay as long as it’s done in the name of the fight on terrorism? You feel comfortable enough smearing Kevin as being soft on terrorism because he dares to consider our freedoms, but surely you have a limit? Where do you draw the line? Come on, Fred and Ted, what say you?
Dawn, I say pay a bit more attention to the thread and who pasted what before you post.
Ted
LOL. C’mon man you can defend yourself better than that!
Dawn
It’s not so much that Kevin has a concern for our freedoms as it is that he, and most liberals, truly hate George Bush. They hate him to the point that they will take an issue like this, which started before Bush was in office, and convince other liberals that Bush wants to spy on them. It is extremely difficult to smear people that are soft on terrorism as being soft on terrorism when they already are soft on terrorism. People that continue to fight the people that are fighting the terrorists are soft on terrorism at best. The fact is that liberals should never be in charge of fighting terrorisim.
Where do I draw the line? Give me a sliding freedom scale of every possible scenario in which our liberties will erode and eventually evaporate. I will then rate each one for you as either acceptable or unacceptable.
We can start with the scenario at hand. The NSA wants to listen in and/or track calls betweens terrorists or suspected terrorists. Acceptable!
Truth
You are not tough on terrorism. You are a coward. The Constitution survived the Revolution, foreign invasion, a civil war, two world wars, and a cold war against an enemy with the ability to turn every inch of this nation into melted glass. And yet you want to throw it all away now, toss aside the great gift our ancestors left to us, because a couple of failed got herders in a cave got lucky once. I cannot even concieve of what it must be like to live a life so filled with fear. One could almost pity you if your cowardice was not threatneing the freedoms of us all.
And more, you are not only a coward, you are a liar. You insit that the program is meant to track only terorrists, and yet you write those words under a post detailing how the program affects tens of millions of American citizens, tracks them and pins their lives ot the walls of the NSA for inspection without warrant, cause, justification, or accountabality. I know you can read, so you must be delibertly lying. I wonder, though, if the lie really is deliberate. I wonder if perhaps your mind slides past the reality of the program, so clearly laid out in the articles you are commenting on, because it simply cannot face the fact that it has abandoned every ideal Americans have fought and died for over the last two hundred years. You may not be lying, Truth — you may simply be unable to register reality as a defense mechanism.
Kevin
Ahhh… This is the old Kevin I know. Getting on a soapbox, going on and on and on and on, while taking name calling to a new level. Coward? Do you mean like the guys that ran off to Canada in the 60’s and 70’s? Liar? Puhhleeeze! Look at Bill Clinton next time he wags his finger at you and then you will really know what a liar is.
The tired liberal tactic of name calling is nowhere remotely a substitute for debate. It’s amusing to me that a person calls me a coward shrouded under the anonymity of a blog. Kevin, just let me say I am really disappointed in you. However, I am not really surprised.
Dawn
How’s that list coming along?
Truth
And this is the Truth I know — always run back to screaming about how horrible Clinotn was and ignoring the fact that I caught you in an obvious lie.
A coward you are, Truth, and a coward you shall remain whether we call you on it or not. We might as well calll you on it. Anyone who, as you did, insists on making this issue into a measure of “toughness” makes his personal lack of fortitude relevant.
Kevin
Dude; I understand why you want to forget about Clinton but slow down a bit before going into a frenzy and contradicting yourself.
“Anyone who, as you did, insists on making this issue into a measure of “toughness” makes his personal lack of fortitude relevant.”
Besides your sentence not making any sense you are talking about yourself here. You are the one going on about ‘toughness’ I never even mentioned the word! I responded to Ted bringing up the issue of Democrats being ‘soft’ on terrorism. Hold it… are you confusing Ted and myself the same way Dawn did?
If you don’t like the way the current administration is handling things, win some elections! I love watching liberals go about in denial on this issue. The only ones you are fooling are yourselves. Please stay in this cloud of denial that is as thick as cannabis smoke. It makes winning elections for conservatives so much easier.
How about the rest of you liberals out there? Got anything other than name calling?
Kevin said: “The Constitution survived the Revolution,”
Fred: Which Revolution was that? The Constitution was not in existence until after the American Revolution.
Truth:
I find it laughable that someone whose screen name is “The Truth” (actual name and location: unknown) would chide someone who goes by “Kevin” (actual name and location: Kevin, Memphis, TN) about being “shrouded under anonymity.” That’s absolutely rich. I suspect you wouldn’t recognize the irony here if it hit you in the face.
As to your constant griping about Clinton, it’s not so much that we don’t want to talk about Clinton, and more that you constantly hide behind “But Clinton!” whenever the subject at hand turns away from you. All the more evidence of your cowardice: whenever you start losing an argument, you change the subject to Clinton.
Yeah, Clinton lied about a blowjob. Deplorable, but in the grand scheme of things, who cares? It’s not like Clinton’s lies started a disastrous quarter-trillion dollar war that has also cost well over two thousand American lives and countless Iraqi lives and has, if anything, only served to strenghten or real enemy, al-Qaeda.
I guess I can understand, though. You have to rant about Clinton, because attempting to defend Bush’s abysmal performance in the war on terror is too much bull even for you to attempt.
tg: It’s not like Clinton’s lies started a disastrous quarter-trillion dollar war that has also cost well over two thousand American lives and countless Iraqi lives and has, if anything, only served to strenghten or real enemy, al-Qaeda.
Fred: Who did that?
Tgirsch
Dean from Tucson (actually Oro Valley a nice suburb bordering on the northwest) here. Truth be told, no one here ever asked me my name or location. You should find it interesting that no one has ever called me a coward to my face.
In a blog all you really have left is name calling that would ever be accepted under any other circumstance. That’s all it is Tgirsch, name calling. I expect it from Kevin but you, my friend, are so much more able to make a lucid argument. I suppose this once again demonstrates that at the end of it all most liberals only have this tactic left!
I guarantee you that Kevin and Tgirsch from Memphis do not walk up to people in Memphis they disagree with and call them names like they so readily do on a blog. I would suggest it to them as an experiment and then report back to us the results.
You should find it ironic that you and Kevin are so fast to call people liars, with no proof, while at the same time saying it doesn’t matter that a proven liar like impeached, disbarred and disgraced former President Clinton doesn’t matter. We call this having two different standards.
Truth
You know, in all that verbiage, you haven;t gone back and explained away your obvious lie from several posts up.
And someone who says “Democrats are soft on terorrism” is, my English challanged little friend, making a personal argument attack on Democrats. democrats, in that formulation, aren’t wrong in dealing with terorists, they are too “soft” — weak, afraid — to deal with terrorists. I am sorry if you do not like your tactics thrown back at you, but that is really not my problem.
And, Truth, I called you a coward becasue you are acting in a cowardly fashion. You are apparnelty so terrified of terrorists that you are willing to shred the Constitution and lie about the programs in question to justify that shredding. A program that targets tens of millions of people, and is used to keep track of journalists sources, I might add, is in no way consistant with the COnstitution. You don’t even have the guts to take that argumment: you immediately lied about the nature of the program and attacked Dems for being soft. Not a substantive oratory, my friend. When called on it, you retreated to “Clinton is bad!” Not a response worthy of much respect.
Time out. Things have gotten out of hand here. Let’s all cool off and get back to the more civilized posting that usually goes on here. We are all capable of contributing more than we are at the moment.
To the degree that we can all refrain from making blanket statements about liberals and conservatives and such, I believe we will have a higher signal to noise ratio on this blog, and we will all learn more.
I freely admit that I have been too harsh with Kevin and KTK in particular. I also freely admit that I have learned a lot from Kevin and TGirsch, and they have actually changed my views on certain issues (global warming being one). My point here is if we all approach this exercise with a willingness to listen, and reduce the personal attacks, I think we will all get more from our time here. [sermon ends]
Truth:
Umm, exactly what name did I call you? I haven’t engaged in any name-calling here whatsoever.
And as Kevin has repeatedly pointed out, you’re still dancing around and outright avoiding the subject actually at hand. If you think we’re guilty of “name calling” and “personal attacks,” then perhaps the better response would be to not “sink to our level,” but to address the actual substance of the argument. But you haven’t done this; you’ve just complained about what you perceive as bad form tactics and avoided substance.
Kevin
Yes it appears to be old but I would bet you will find similar results in any of todays polls;
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20030530-124908-6112r.htm
I’m not afraid of terrorists, in fact there is very little that I am afraid of. I am, however, afraid of letting liberals be in charge of the situation. If the NSA wants to track down terrorists I am all for that. Your assertion that this is the creation of a surveillance state is simple rhetoric not really worthy of much comment. Where were you when Hillary was caught with all those FBI file in her closet? Once again you have two standards, one for liberals and one for those fighting terrorism. If the NSA needs to cross reference records to help them, go for it! If there is abuse found, deal with the individual situation of abuse. We can not afford to stop tracking down and killing terrorists.
(The Truth braces himself for yet another round of name calling by Kevin…)
Out of respect for Ted, no more talk of cowardice …
“Where were you when Hillary was caught with all those FBI file in her closet? Once again you have two standards, one for liberals and one for those fighting terrorism”
Umm, did you just criticize me for not writing a blog post on an event that happened when the Internet was barely around? For the record, if the Clintons did misue FBI files, then they should be criticized for it.
” Your assertion that this is the creation of a surveillance state is simple rhetoric not really worthy of much comment. ”
That is not an argument. WHY am I wrong, Truth? Why is the collection fo tens of millions of peoples record seithout warrant or oversight not part and parcel of a survielance state –especialy considering that we already know it has been used agaisnt reporters and teir sources? how is that not a violation of Constitutional principles? And how effective can the program be when Frist could not come up with a single instance of it being useful, despite his rather open discusion, moment sbefore, of detaisl on how the program worked?
Dawn: “Is any infrignment on our freedoms okay as long as it’s done in the name of the fight on terrorism? You feel comfortable enough smearing Kevin as being soft on terrorism because he dares to consider our freedoms”
Fred: I wasn’t aware that it was a constitutional freedom to have the phone numbers you call to be a secret. I don’t remember addressing Kevin’s position on terrorism or calling him soft. I suppose this is another instance of you lumping people together because of your hate and prejudices. In case you haven’t noticed, Ted and I agree on very little.